performance art

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Forbes, 2024

Forbes, 2024. Chad Scott reports on O’Grady’s “Both/And” exhibit at the Davis Museum of Wellesley College. As an alum of Wellesely, O’Grady’s exhibit and accompanying archival materials offers a unique experience for students to learn about the journey of a former student forging their own path in the art world.

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Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 2024

The Momentary, 2024. To commemorate the acquisition of “Untitled: Mlle Bourgeoise Noire,” by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Larissa Ramey examines O’Grady’s presentations of Black womanhood and identity within her work which sheds light on the intricate intersection of race and gender in contemporary society.”

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Winston-Salem Journal, 2022

Tom Patterson forms a based chronology of O'Grady's diverse range of careers. He notes her positions as an intelligence analyst for the federal government and a freelance writer for Rolling Stone, all of which she held before she was 40 years old. He studies her persona “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire” in her pivot to start an art practice in the latter half of her life.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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Alexander Gray Associates, 2015

Published by Alexander Gray Associates, the catalogue of Rivers, First Draft includes forty-eight images of the 1982 performance O’Grady created for the public art program, “Art Across the Park.” The catalogue provides an in-depth look at O’Grady's work, featuring visual documentation of her performance along with writings by the artist providing insight into her creative process and art practice.

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Hyperallergic on Art Is…, 2015

Louis Bury on "Art Is..." — Bury's lengthy and magisterial review is a model of intellectual attention to what is being seen — both inside and outside the frame. Beginning with the freedom of the piece's title, it examines framing as form, content and metaphor, and illluminates police presence and the relation of viewer to viewed.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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