Observer, 2021
Anni Irish offers an overview of O’Grady’s art practice in consideration of her retrospective, Both/And, focusing on key conceptual stakes, such as the artist’s interest in language as form.
Anni Irish offers an overview of O’Grady’s art practice in consideration of her retrospective, Both/And, focusing on key conceptual stakes, such as the artist’s interest in language as form.
Jillian Steinhauer reviews O'Grady's retrospective exhibition “Both/And” at the Brooklyn Museum. The article highlights O'Grady's pioneering work in performance art and her exploration of race, gender, and identity in her practice. Steinhauer describes O'Grady's personal history, including her West Indian heritage, her education, and her career as a writer before she turned to art, another aspect of her life that significantly informs her art practice.
Upon the opening of O’Grady’s retrospective Both/And, Artforum devotes much of its March 2021 issue to her prolific art practice. Catherine Damman provides a decades-long overview of her career, Mira Dayal focuses on Miscegenated Family Album, and David Fiasco interviews the artist on new works in progress.
Christina Sharpe writes a crucial essay upon the publishing of Lorraine O’Grady’s collected writings and interviews, entitled Writing in Space, suggesting that the artist’s “fierce intelligence, wit and humor, curiosity, anger” is the grist for social revolution.
In a one-paragraph review of Both/And, Lynne Cooke includes O’Grady’s retrospective in her highlights of 2021, noting the artist’s “fiercely intelligent, subversive” defiance of race-based exclusion in the New York art world and Second-wave feminist movement.
Written in the Fall 2018 Art Guide, Hyperallergic suggests that O’Grady, in her interrogation of print journalism issued in her series Cutting Out CONYT, calls for a collapse of language’s ability to signify meaning for a wide-ranging public.
Caille Millner, on Rivers, First Draft as a living Künstlerroman — Whereas to many the performance may seem surrealist (in the way early readers saw García Márquez's 100 Years of Solitude as surrealist when that novel was, if not realistic, quite real), Millner adeptly demystifies the work's collage aesthetic, seeing the piece as literalized metaphor, a guide to women of color wishing to become artists.
Alan Gilbert review of Lorraine O'Grady at Alexander Gray — The editor of the College Art Association's caa.reviews, through a close formal description of "Cutting Out the New York Times," mimicked by that of the "Rivers, First Draft" wall installation, points to how their form provides an associative logic needed to make sense of the individuation process unfolding on the wall.
Holland Cotter, Art & Design — Cotter's review of O'Grady's exhibit at Alexander Gray focuses on her use of collage in both "Cutting Out the New York Times" and "Rivers, First Draft" as a method of shaping her complex history.
The Poem Will Resemble You — Mauss’s article for Artforum is, with Wilson’s INTAR catalogue essay, one of the most extended and incisive pieces on O’Grady’s oeuvre to date. It was one-half of a two-article feature that also included O’Grady’s artist portfolio for The Black and White Show.
Lorraine O’Grady: Critical Interventions — Catalogue essay for O'Grady's first solo exhibit: "Lorraine O'Grady," photomontages, INTAR Gallery, 420 W 42nd St, NYC, Jan 21-Feb 22, 1991. Includes authoritative account of artist's earlier career.