political art

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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?”

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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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Lynne Cooke, Artforum, 2021

In a one-paragraph review of Both/And, Lynne Cooke includes O’Grady’s retrospective in her highlights of 2021, noting the artist’s “fiercely intelligent, subversive” defiance of race-based exclusion in the New York art world and Second-wave feminist movement.

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New York Times, 2020

Zachary Small reports on President Biden’s homage to “Art Is…” in his 2020 presidential campaign advertisement. The article places O’Grady amongst other artists similarly addressing the political climate of 2020. While Alexander Gray warns that “a piece like this is so easy for advertisers to appropriate,” the article makes clear that O’Grady gave her blessing on the campaign’s concept. “Biden is saying the same thing to the country that I was saying to the art world.”

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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.

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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.

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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…”

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The New Republic, 2017

Lovia Gyarkye considers how O’Grady’s performance persona 
Mlle Bourgeoise Noire,” featured in the We Wanted a Revolution exhibition, acted as a catalyst for a more inclusive feminist revolution. The article imagines the available potential in visibility, “if Black women were not just seen, but finally heard.”

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Harvard Cazette, 2015

Susan Saccoccia reviews Lorraine O’Grady’s first solo exhibition at the Carpenter Center, entitled “When Margins Become Centers,” focusing on the artist’s approach to connecting personal stories with cross-cultural histories. As Saccocia writes, in a lecture that “unfolded like a great dinner table conversation, rich with anecdotes and touches of humor,” O’Grady shares her drive to “make the invisible visible.”

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