diptych

68

Simplebooklet.com, 2024

In her introduction for “Teaching/Learning with Lorraine O’Grady’s Both/And,” Amanda Gilvin offers a unique vantage point for viewing the renowned artist’s multi-decade career. While many have described O’Grady as becoming an artist later in life, Gilvin highlights the links between Wellesley College and the development of O’Grady’s groundbreaking concept of “both/and” over time, revealing that perhaps it was while at the college, her artistry first began to take form.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Boston Globe, 2024

Boston Globe, 2024. Ahead of the showing of “Both/And” at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Murray Whyte provides a comprehensive background on O’Grady beginning as one the few Black graduates of Wellesley College in 1955. Whyte offers an overview of some of O’Grady’s most renowned works that are included in the exhibit such as “Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire,” “Rivers, First Draft,” and “Cutting Out The New York Times”

Read MoreDownload PDF

The Bay State Banner, 2024

The Bay State Banner, 2024. Susan Saccocia reviews O’Grady’s “Both/And” at the Davis Museum at O’Grady’s alma mater, Wellesley College. Saccocia describes several of O’Grady’s most prominent works on display in the exhibit and highlights how the show weaves the narrative of O’Grady’s lustrous and expansive career.

Read MoreDownload PDF

WBUR, 2024

WBUR, 2024. Arielle Gray explores the works featured in O’Grady’s “Both/And” exhibit as well as O’Grady’s own writing and words, Arielle Gray. While some may view some of O’Grady’s life as a journey to become an artist, Gray highlights how she always was one. Synthesizing O’Grady’s impact on the art world and her own view of her body of work, Gray finds that it’s not only a critique of or disruption O’Grady seeks, but she crafts a world that shows “all of her multiplicity and nuance.”

Read MoreDownload PDF

First Of The Month, 2023

First of the Month, 2023. This Met is Mine — In his thoughtful essay, Ben Khadim DeMott details his first encounter with O’Grady’s Miscegenated Family Album at the Booth collection at the University of Chicago which unearthed his own familial memories of trips to Met and viewing the Ancient Egyptian exhibit. Through research DeMott finds that “(Cross Generational) L: Nefertiti, the last image; R: Devonia\’s youngest Daughter, Kimberley,” is a part of the larger performance piece, “Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline.” He explores the cathartic potential of art as shown in O’Gradys works which serve first as a balm not an analytic correction of history.

Read MoreDownload PDF

The New Yorker, 2022

Lorraine O’Grady Has Always Been A Rebel—In this conversation for The New Yorker, Doreen St. Felix and O’Grady discuss the artist’s nonconformist attitudes which she cultivated in childhood, rebelling from a middle class, Black immigrant family. This spirit of rebellion foregrounded O’Grady’s interest in the avant-garde and her penchant for conceptualism.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Aware, 2022

For Aware’s index of worm artists, Stephanie Sparling Williams writes on O’Grady’s unique path to becoming an artist from US intelligence analyst, teacher, translator, and critic to avant-garde performances and photo installations.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Hyperallergic, 2022

Ela Bittencourt delivers polished prose after visiting Body Is The Ground of My Experience on view at Alexander Gray Associates in 2022. Notably, she praises O’Grady’s hybrid mode of making critique into a pleasurable venture.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Artforum, 2022

O’Grady receives a mention amongst artists Allan Sekula, Frederico Morais, Park Chan-Kyong, and Marcel Broodthaers. All artists, Heddaya contends, maintain a “writerly” approach that he likens to the art historical impulse to compare and contrast two forms alongside each other in a diptych format.

Read MoreDownload PDF

The New York Times Style Magazine, 2021

Both Sides Now: In Conversation With Lorraine O’Grady—In an interview with Kate Guadagnino, O’grady discusses a typical day in her life as a working artist and her current interests.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Collector Daily, 2021

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And @Brooklyn Museum—Loring Knoblauch provides a comprehensive review of O’Grady’s Both/And retrospective offering a detailed listing of the artworks displayed, and the mapping of the show. Looking closely at each component presented at the Brooklyn Museum, Knoblauch finds that what emerges is the importance of conceptualism and idea-driven practices to O’Grady’s work.

Read MoreDownload PDF

New York Times, 2021

Lorraine O’Grady, Still Cutting Into the Culture—Forty years after O’Grady debuted Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, declaring that Black art to take more risks, O’Grady receives her first retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum which features the launch of a new persona. In this profile, Siddhartha Mitter showcases how O’Grady has continuously pursued new ventures, pushing culture forward in her quests of discovery.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Art in America, 2021

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.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Duke Up, 2020

For Those Who Will Know—In her introduction for O’Grady’s “Writing in Space,” the first collection of the artist’s writing, Aruna D’Souza illuminates the throughline of forward-thinking found in O’Grady’s groundbreaking art. Resisting the simple and rigid classifications that box in many women and Black artists, O’Grady has continuously complicated and challenged cultural notions of binarism. This provocation has taken form in all modes of her practices—from her seminal performance of alter ego Mlle Bourgeoise Noir to the recurrent diptychs bridging unexpected figures like Michael Jackson and Charles Baudelaire. D’Souza delineates how these works are foregrounded by O’Grady’s training as a writer.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Hyperallergic, 2020

Alexandra M. Thomas affirms the range of O’Grady’s literature upon the release of her collected essays and interviews entitled Writing in Space, making clear the wisdom in her scholarship, much of which was written before she was (recognized as) a practicing artist.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Gallery Gurls, 2018

Alexandria Deters offers a detailed formal analysis of Cutting Out CONYT. The article considers how the collages present as – but in reality, are far from – a ‘stream of consciousness’ approach to writing. Deter draws sobering connections between the sensational headlines of the 1970s with the political climate of the 2010s.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Heather Kapplow, Hyperallergic, 2015

A Walk Through the World of Lorraine O'Grady — Heather Kapplow, the Boston reviewer, replicates O'Grady's working method by walking backwards, turning the exhibit itself into a diptych, video on one side, wall works on the other, setting in motion a permanent back-and-forth questioning and answering between the two so that the only resolution is to embrace a permanent, un-hierarchized equivalence.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Boston Globe, 2015

Cate McQuaid on "Where Margins Become Centers" — In this enthusiastic review of the Carpenter Center show, which she later discussed further in an end-of-year column on Boston's galleries, the award-winning critic declares that, after the early performances, O'Grady's work "grew more precise and more searing."

Read MoreDownload PDF

Andil Gosine, 2012

Unpublished article on New Worlds — The unpublished article by Gosine, a York University (Toronto) professor who'd written earlier on hybridity in O'Grady's work, is a perceptive and detailed analysis of the subject's treatment in her New Worlds show at Alexander Gray, NY.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Judith Hoos-Fox, 2012

A Generous Medium: Photography at Wellesley, 1972-2012 — The curator of the Wellesley Davis Museum's 1994 exhibit Body As Measure, in which Miscegenated Family Album was first shown, looks back movingly on her encounter with the work in the artist's studio and on the complexities of purchasing work by an alumna.

Read MoreDownload PDF