Just Above Midtown

40

Harper’s Bazaar, 2024

The Audacity of Lorraine O’Grady—In this profile of O’Grady, Soraya Nadia McDonald offers careful consideration of the artist whose belated welcome into many institutions has set her a part as a forward-thinking rebel in the art world. Often cited as a major influence among fellow Black women artists, much of the world has finally caught up to O’Grady.

Read MoreDownload PDF

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

Wellesley Magazine, 2024

Wellesley Magazine, 2024. Kerry Gaertner Gerbracht offers an insightful look into O’Grady’s prolific career as a writer, teacher, and artist in this article covering the opening of “Both/And” at the Davis Museum. Gerbracht notes the expansion of the exhibit from its original showing which includes pieces directly related to her time at Wellesley College as a student.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Hyperallergic, 2023

Hyperallergic 2023. What Just Above Midtown Meant for Black Artists — Taylor Michael reviews “Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces at the Museum of Modern Art” which included stills from O’Grady’s Mlle Bourgeoise Noire as well as her most recent persona, The Knight.

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

Artnet, 2022

Folasade Ologundudu interviews Linda Goode-Bryant on her gallery project, Just Above Midtown. The gallery space hosted exhibitions for emerging artists of color from 1974 to 1986. The two discuss MoMA’s acquisition of the JAM archive. Goode-Bryant expresses that while she feels validated for the work that she and her collaborators did, she is also considering the danger of ‘cultural co-option’ that may arise with archiving her project at a predominately white arts institution.

Read MoreDownload PDF

New York Times, 2022

Aruna D’Souza offers historicizes the foundational years at Just Above Midtown, the gallery project of Linda Goode-Bryant, which platformed artists including David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, and Maren Hassinger early in their careers. D’Souza addresses the show’s goals to highlight the gallery’s history of the 1970s and 1980s, while also enlivening its archive as it remains active into the 2020s. For Goode-Bryant, the question of integrity arises: “Can JAM be JAM at MoMA?”

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

Artforum, 2021

Risk Everything—Ahead of the “Both/And” retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, Catherinne Damman writes an insightful essay on the varied art and career of O’Grady. Of her many practices, Damman sees “risk as [O’Grady’s] primary medium,” foregoing easy stratifications in favor of deep inquiry and interrogation of the structures that bind.

Read MoreDownload PDF

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.

Read MoreDownload PDF

New York Vulture, 2021

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.

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

Catherine Damman, Mira Dayal, and David Velasco, Artforum, 2021

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.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Holland Cotter, New York Times, 2021

Holland Cotter, a chronic reviewer of O’Grady’s work, calls attention to the exhibition design of her retrospective, Both/And. She remarks on how the artist’s pervasive installation, which weaves throughout the museum, encourages viewers to reconsider the institution’s permanent collection through a critical lens.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Boston Globe, 2021

In light of O’Grady’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, Murray Whyte argues for the artist’s embrace of cultural hybridity through an in-depth analysis of her art practice. Specifically, she considers how O’Grady’s insistence to be “both/and” – to contain multiple backgrounds at the same time, refusing a singular identity – could usher in the next generation of interdisciplinary, multicultural artists.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Artforum, 2019

For Artforum, Colby Chamberlain articulates the nuanced, critical value of O’Grady’s “haiku diptychs.” In the review, he traces O’Grady’s deconstruction of print language to the post-Modernist lineage of Benjamin, Derrida, and Mallarmé, which she taught at the School of the Visual Arts around the same time the prints were in production.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Experience Magazine, 2019

Heather Kapplow conducts a formal analysis of O’Grady’s performance persona, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, in an attempt to bridge her pioneering artwork of the 1980s with the activism of Black public figures in the 2010s.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Chase Quinn, Hyperallergic, 2018

Chase Quinn casts light on O’Grady’s performance personas in his review of the exhibition From Me to Them to Me Again. The writer considers the artist’s persona of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire to exemplify her career of fighting against art world racism and Western binarism at large.

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

Wellesley Magazine, 2017

April Austin offers a detailed genealogy of O’Grady’s art career – specifically emphasizing the formative years spent at her alma mater, Wellesley College – on the occasion of O’Grady donating her archive to the College’s library.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Media Diversified, 2017

Tonya Nelson traces histories of political protests and activism from the civil rights movement to the more contemporary Black Lives Matter movement – problematizing the roots of Western individualism at large. Her critique reveals itself through her analyses of works by Lorraine O’Grady, Maren Hassinger, and Linda Goode-Bryant, all featured in the group exhibitions Soul of a Nation and We Wanted A Revolution.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Hyperallergic, 2017

Upon the opening of the group exhibition We Wanted A Revolution, Jessica Bell Brown celebrates the Black female artists-activists who made space to create their own art world in the 1970s and 80s, including Lorraine O’Grady, Linda Goode-Bryant, and Senga Nengudi. Brown reminds her audience that the work doesn’t stop at this exhibition; she strongly urges museums to acquire the exhibited pieces into their permanent collections.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Paris Review, 2016

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.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Stedelijk Studies #3, 2016

"Frame Me": Speaking Out of Turn and Lorraine O'Grady's Alien Avant-Garde — In the first major academic article on O'Grady, Stephanie Sparling Williams, using both the definition of "alien" as stranger and the Brechtian "alienation effect," provides a first line of theorization, stating: "As both alien and avant-garde, [it paves] the way for these two terms to be theorized in close proximity as a distinctive position from which to deploy strategic visibility and voice."

Read MoreDownload PDF

Wellesley Magazine, 2013

Lisa Scanlon on O'Grady's archive at Wellesley College — Associate editor Scanlon, writing on the newly opened Lorrraine O'Grady Papers, the College's first major alumnae archives, calls the collection a means to preserve the records of the artist's "permanent rebellion."

Read MoreDownload PDF

Art Fag City, 2012

Alana Chloe Esposito, Unnatural Attitudes — A sensitive summary of O'Grady's biography and its effect on her art, Esposito's piece sees the work as emerging from the artist's pressure to understand and become herself.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Ben Davis, 2012

Lorraine O'Grady's Hair Stare Fare, Village Voice — Davis's career evaluation and review of New Worlds at Alexander Gray, NY, O'Grady's show comprised of The Fir-Palm, The Clearing, and the projected video Landscape (Western Hemisphere), is suggestively sub-titled "A veteran artist turns identity into abstract art."

Read MoreDownload PDF

Nick Mauss in Artforum, 2009

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.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Calvin Reid, 1993

A West Indian Yankee in Queen Nefertiti’s Court — The first critical article on O'Grady's work as a whole, and still one of the best. Published in New Observations #97: COLOR. September/October 1993. Special issue, edited by ADRIAN PIPER.

Read MoreDownload PDF

Judith Wilson, 1991

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.

Read MoreDownload PDF