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Our Culture Mag, 2026

Eileen Harris Norton Carrie Mae Weems race Frank Bowling Destiny Is a Rose Noah Davis Hauser & Wirth Lynette Yiadom-Boakye artists of colour Alma Thomas Californian artists Mlle Bourgeoise Noire gender identity Mark Bradford David Hammons Glenn Ligon Jack Whitten Amy Sherald women artists Kara Walker

Destiny Is a Rose, on view at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles through August 16, 2026, presents more than 80 works from the collection of Eileen Harris Norton, marking fifty years since her first acquisition in 1976. The exhibition celebrates her longstanding commitment to artists of color, women artists, and those connected to California, featuring works by Kerry James Marshall, Mark Bradford, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, and Lorraine O’Grady, among others.

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Rivers and Just Above Midtown, 2013, 2015

dance Just Above Midtown Lowery Stokes Sims black avant-garde Fred Wilson Rivers First Draft Artforum autobiography performance art Linda Goode Bryant David Hammons Senga Nengudi 2015 2013

Text read at MOMA's Now Dig This! symposium — A meditation on why Rivers, First Draft might not have existed without the Just Above Midtown Gallery’s challenging and supportive environment.

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My Attraction to the Surrealists, 2013

black surrealism Surrealism 2013 western cultural hegemony unpublished Perfoma

For Simone Leigh and Performa's conference on Black Surrealism — O'Grady taught a course on Futurism, Dada and Surrealism at SVA for 20 years but had not written of the movements' effect on her work. These rough notes made for a conference presenter indicate why she loved their methodologies more than their art.

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My 1980s, Art Journal 2012

Art Is... This Will Have Been modernism white feminism post-modernism Heresies collective black female subjectivity performance art Adrian Piper the Black and White Show 2012 Just Above Midtown historiography black avant-garde western cultural hegemony autobiography mother

Artist feature, CAA Art Journal, Summer 2012 — Based on her lecture in conjunction with the exhibit This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s, the article puts several early works in historical context and explains O'Grady's reverse trajectory from "post-black" to "black."

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Contributor Text, Paris Triennale, 2012

the Caribbean Ancient Egypt black female subjectivity sibling rivalry hybridity autobiography political art Miscegenated Family album diaspora writing in space 2012

Text for the 2012 Paris Triennale English-language website — Written to replace a curatorial text on the Trennale's English website, the text describes the effect of O'Grady's hybrid background on content and form in her work, elaborating this with respect to Miscegenated Family Album, her "novel in space" in the Triennale.

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