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.
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.
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.