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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
O’Grady’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, Both/And, receives a sincere note of respect on Jack Bankowsky’s top ten exhibitions seen in 2021.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
Feature on "EN MAS': Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean" — Reviewer Rebecca Lee Reynolds displays keen appreciation of the format of O'Grady's "reaction video," her commission for "EN MAS," which opened at CAC New Orleans before its traveling tour to the National Galleries of the Cayman Isalnds and of The Bahamas, plus centers of the diaspora.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Artforum, Artists Curate, January – Cady Noland's "Back At You" portfolio brings together artists such as Chris Burden, Adrian Piper and Lorraine O'Grady whose work takes "considerable risks."
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.
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.
Art Is . . . — Highlighted box review, taking a retrospective look at O’Grady’s 1983 performance Art Is.... In “Sniper’s Nest,” Z Magazine, July-August 1988, p 102
“Dialogues,” Just Above Midtown Gallery — Patricia S. Jones discusses a downtown gallery performance series at Just Above Midtown, NYC, Oct 1980 in a late 70s-early 80s annual journal. Article makes special note of O’Grady’s first performance of Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline.