feminism

9

New York Times, 2022

Siddhartha Mitter interviews Simone Leigh on Sovereignty, her installation for the U.S. Pavillion at the Venice Biennale. Leigh’s mentor, O’Grady, expresses enthusiasm for the symposium Loophole of Retreat that will accompany the show in October 2022.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Artforum, 2022

Rizvana Bradley responds to Seph Rodney’s essay published in Hyperallergic, “Discovering How Black Women Might Forge a Path to Freedom.” In recounting the “Loophole of Retreat” conference – organized by Simone Leigh at the Venice Biennale in 2022 – Bradley offers a sound critique of Rodney’s writing on the conference, which reconsiders in/accessibility in artistic discourse.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Hyperallergic, 2022

Seph Rodney recounts his experience at Simone Leigh’s symposium held in conjunction with the artist’s presentation of Leigh’s work at the US Pavilion for the Venice Biennale. The symposium “Loophole of Retreat” brought together artists and theorists alike to consider political liberation and sovereignty for Black women. He writes about Lorraine O’Grady’s conversation with Leigh, one that concerned the Decolonize Museums protests that happened outside of her retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021. She began to question just what the privilege of a solo institutional show provided her, and how she could make new allyships with those afforded less power than her, notably trans activists.

Read MoreDownload PDF

The Philadelphia Tribune, 2021

In a review of the retrospective Both/And, Siddhartha Mitter sings the praises of O’Grady’s deft political critique. Having developed a rapport with the artist through his repeated reviews of her work, he quotes the artist in conversation: “I am making incisions on the skin of culture” […] “it is work I’ll be doing for the rest of my life.”

Read MoreDownload PDF

Ithaca Times, 2021

G.M. Burns reviews Stephanie Sparling Williams’ new book, Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Language, which he marks as crucial in contextualizing O’Grady’s artistry. The article also includes an interview with Dr. Williams that explores her interest in engaging the artist’s work.

Read MoreDownload PDF

The Drama Review, 2018

Drawing on the Black Feminist scholarship of Hortense Spillers, Beth Capper interprets O’Grady’s performances as representing life lived in the “interstice” between two worlds. The rigorously academic essay situates O’Grady’s work in a lineage of radical Black artists (David Hammons and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to name two) who deal with the limits of language and the politics of visual representation.

Read MoreDownload PDF

The Guardian, 2017

In a review of Soul of a Nation, Steven Thrasher praises O’Grady for “putting Harlem into focus,” suggesting that art can happen on the street – outside of the confines of the museum – embodied through her 1983 performance work “Art Is…”

Read MoreDownload PDF