In this New York Times overview of performance art's history, curator Klaus Biesenbach, artist Martha Wilson, and historian RoseLee Goldberg reflect on the challenges of defining the medium. The timeline highlights pivotal moments from the early 20th century to the present, including Lorraine O’Grady’s groundbreaking 1980 performances as Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire, which challenged exclusion and inequality within the art world.
Lorraine O’Grady receives a mention in The New York Times Editors’ “Favorite Arts Photos of 2021.” After seeing her profile photograph captured by Lelanie Foster, which intimately portrays the artist who smugly wears silver rings and red lipstick, the artist commented, “Ohhhh, I look GOOOOD!”
O’Grady’s retrospective Both/And (and her publication Writing in Space) receive an honorable mention in Holland Cotter and Roberta Smith’s roundup of 2021’s most notable art exhibitions.
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.
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.
The “Goings-on About Town” section of The New Yorker zeroes in on O’Grady’s “poetic, yet pointed” revised collages, Cutting Out CONYT. When a personal voice begins to show itself in the works, it camouflages itself: the journalist who writes headlines blurs with the artist who composes the text into provocative absurdities.
Alexandria Deters offers a detailed formal analysis of Cutting Out CONYT. The article considers how the collages present as – but in reality, are far from – a ‘stream of consciousness’ approach to writing. Deter draws sobering connections between the sensational headlines of the 1970s with the political climate of the 2010s.
In a review of Cutting Out CONYT, Sarah Cascone describes O’Grady’s statements on political narrative as profoundly revealing and “previously unthinkable” in her earlier series Cutting Out the New York Times.
Written in the Fall 2018 Art Guide, Hyperallergic suggests that O’Grady, in her interrogation of print journalism issued in her series Cutting Out CONYT, calls for a collapse of language’s ability to signify meaning for a wide-ranging public.