In 2017, O’Grady was one of the 3 annual recipients of the Wellesley Alumnae Achievement Award since the Awards began in 1948, joining such previous winners as: Madeleine Korbel Albright, JudyAnn Bigby, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nora Ephron, Maria Morris Hambourg, Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Amalya L. Kearse, Pamela Melroy, Barbara Scott Preiskel, Santha Rama Rau, Diane Sawyer, Leticia Ramos Shahani, Lynn Sherr, Alvia Wardlaw, Patricia J. Williams, and Shirley Young.

THE FEMINIST AVANT-GARDE OF THE 1970s

“Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Beats Herself with The-Whip-That-Made-Plantations-Move,” from Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Goes to the New Museum, 1981.

October 7, 2016-January 7, 2017. The Photographers’ Gallery, London. Works from the Verbund Collection, Vienna. Co-curated by: Gabriele Schor (Sammlung Verbund) and Anna Dannemann (The Photographers’ Gallery). Exhibition travels, 2016-18, to: Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, Austria; Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; The Brno House of Arts, Brno, Czech Republic; and Stavanger Art Museum, Stavanger, Norway. From the Press Release: “An expansive exhibition comprising forty-eight international female artists and over 150 major works from the Verbund Collection in Vienna. The exhibition highlights groundbreaking practices that shaped the feminist art movement and provides a timely reminder of the wide impact of a seminal generation of artists.” In addition to well-known artists such as Valie Export, Suzanne Lacy, Martha Rosler, Cindy Sherman, and Francesca Woodman, there are such less familiar but impressively influential artists as Sanja Ivekovic, Birgit Jürgenssen and Nil Yalter. Earlier exhibits of feminist avant-garde works from the Sammlung Verbund featured 29 artists. The collection has since grown and now includes, among others, Judith Bernstein, Katalin Ladik, and Lorraine O’Grady.

Press Release—http://www.frieze.com/article/feminism-then-and-now

Catalogue—Gabriele Schor, The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s: Works from the Sammlung Verbund Vienna, Prestel, 2016, 512 pp.

CENTRO ANDALUZ DE ARTE CONTEMPORANEO, SEVILLA, SP

Cutting Out the New York Times (1977): six months, 26 poems.

September 15, 2016-January 15, 2017. Aproximación Inicial: Lorraine O’Grady | Initial Recognition: Lorraine O’Grady. Curators: Berta Sichel and Barbara Krulik. Fully occupying the CAAC’s main exhibition space in La Cartuja (the Carthusian Monastery), the exhibition is an extensive survey of O’Grady’s work to date, including full installations of Cutting Out the New York Times (1977), Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980-83/2009), Miscegenated Family Album (1980/94), Art Is… (1983/2009), and The First and the Last of the Modernists (2010), as well as images from Body Is the Ground of My Experience (1991/2012), including “The Clearing: or Cortes and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me” and “The Fir-Palm,” plus room installations of O’Grady’s 18-minute video work Landscape (Western Hemisphere), (2010/11) and Adam Pendleton’s video study, Lorraine O’Grady: A Portrait, now subtitled in Spanish. Catalogue. 

An evocative and effective overview of the exhibit — with Spanish narration and ‘Grady’s responses in English —was produced by Canal Sur (Andalucian TV). This 4 1/2- minute feature video may be found at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QabY8Bzy_k

Additional photos and videos may be seen on the blog of Erika Tamaura, Sonora, Mexico:http://erikatamaura.com/2016/09/21/lorraine-ogrady-aproximacion-inicial-caac_sevilla-sevilla/

For information (in English) on the Lorraine O’Grady’s exhibition at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC), Sevilla, visit: http://www.caac.es/english/exh/projects/frame_log16.htm

LORRAINE O’GRADY: ASK ME ANYTHING ABOUT AGING

Lorraine O’Grady, 2014. Photo by Elia Alba for “The Supper Club” project, NY.

August 4, 2016, New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY.  Conversation performance in the New Museum Theater, August 4, 2016. For Simone Leigh: The Waiting Room, New Museum for Contemporary Art, NY, a three-month residency project and exhibition countering the perception of holistic care as a luxury good through tactics of disobedience, social justice activism, and inter-generational sharing of wellness knowledge among women.

BLACKNESS IN ABSTRACTION: BY ADRIENNE EDWARDS

Video still from Lorraine O’Grady, Landscape (Western Hemisphere), 2010/11. 18 minutes.

June 24-August 19, 2016, Pace Gallery, NY. A select group of 29 artists, including Sol Lewitt, Louise Nevelson, Jack Whitten, Wangechi Mutu, and Adam Pendleton, display a dazzling variety of approaches both to the color black and to the concept of abstraction. Catalogue.

For more information, visit: http://www.pacegallery.com/exhibitions/12802/blackness-in-abstraction

Lorraine O’Grady: Where Margins Become Centers

Oct 29, 2015–Jan 10, 2016. With a boldly minimalist hanging, Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, housed in LeCorbusier’s only building in the western hemisphere, is the first exhibit to effectively shift attention to O’Grady’s wall works as opposed to her earlier performances. The reviewer for the Boston Globe notes: “In those early performances, O’Grady brought the attention of a hermetic white art world to black art and the history of blacks in America. Work that followed grew more precise and more searing.”

For exhibition page, including links to online brochure and photo documentation, visit: http://carpenter.center/program/lorraine-o-grady-where-margins-become-centers

Jul 16, 2015–Mar 6, 2016. The Studio Museum in Harlem’s exhibit, Lorraine O’Grady: Art Is…. has been extended. Originally scheduled to close on October 25, it will be held over until March 6, according to an early press release, “in response to ongoing public enthusiasm.” The independent 40-piece installation O’Grady created from the almost 400 photos she collected of her 1983 eponymous performance in Harlem’s African-American Day Parade provides a full emotional experience of the earlier event, while layering intellectual comment on the exclusion of African Americans from that era’s avant-garde with a glimpse of what has been lost and gained since then. More than one reviewer has said it is worth a trip to the Museum to see this unique record of another time.

For more information visit: http://www.studiomuseum.org/exhibition/lorraine-ogrady-art

ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES, NY: LORRAINE O’GRADY

Rivers First Draft: The Debauchees intersect the Woman in Red, and the rape begins (1982/2015)

May 28-June 27, 2015. In the Main Gallery, the first showing of the Rivers, First Draft installation: 48 C-prints from Kodachromes of the eponymous 1982 performance in Central Park, NY, and produced by Eastman Kodak in 2015. With its “crossroads” theme and Futurist-styled simultaneous action, the Rivers, First Draft performance, featuring the Woman in Red — a prequel to O’Grady’s Mlle Bourgeoise Noire avatar — was the artist’s most autobiographical and feminist piece and has remained a major source of motifs and ideas for her work. Downstairs, in Alexander Gray’s ground-floor gallery, Rivers was introduced by five collage-poems from Cutting Out the New York Times, 1977, the 26-poem series in which O’Grady replied to the Dada-Surrealist theory of the newspaper poem by rejecting its randomness, working instead to create private, counter-confessional poetry from the newspaper’s impersonal, public language.

For complete images and press release, plus reviews, exhibition guide, and online catalogue, visit: http://www.alexandergray.com/exhibitions/lorraine-o-grady3