Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel, is O’Grady’s most recent artistic persona. The Knight—together with attendants Pitchy-Patchy, her squire, and Rociavant, her horse—has set out to finish what her progenitor Mlle Bourgeoise Noire began 40 years earlier.
In 2017, O’Grady revisited her earliest series, Cutting Out the New York Times, creating twenty-five haiku diptychs titled Cutting Out CONYT. In 2024, she expanded the work further with Cutting Out CONYT: The Quadriptychs, which she considers her most complete piece to date.
O'Grady's conceptual video Landscape (Western Hemisphere) comprises nearly twenty minutes of black-and-white footage of the artist's hair blown in different directions, overlaid with various ambient sounds.
In The First and the Last of the Modernists, an installation for the 2010 Whitney Biennial, two of O’Grady’s careers—rock music critic and avant-garde artist—met unexpectedly. She’d taught the work of Charles Baudelaire for two decades at SVA.
Project for Artpace, San Antonio, is O'Grady's first video installation. With a generously funded residency, she was able to experiment and, as a "reactive artist," she chose to make herself open to the...
Continues O'Grady's attempt to engage and comprehend the self through the study of cultural history, and vice versa. Her historic approach to postmodernist concerns (O'Grady won the Sons of...
O'Grady's 1994 photo-installation of cibachrome diptychs, is aesthetically perhaps her most complete and satisfying work. It had a long gestation period. Its 16 diptychs were selected from...
BodyGround, shorthand for Body Is the Ground of My Experience, refers to the photomontages produced by O’Grady for her first one-person exhibit, at INTAR Gallery, NYC, Jan 21–Feb 22, 1991. The phrase doesn’t ...
A joyful performance in Harlem's African-American Day Parade, September 1983, was, from the point of view of the work's connection with its audience, O'Grady's most immediately successful piece. Its impetus ...
An exhibition curated by O'Grady at the black-owned Kenkeleba Gallery on East 2nd Street, NYC, April 22 - May 22, 1983, was a conceptual art piece employing other artists' work to make its point...
A one-night only performance done at Franklin Furnace in early 1983 in what O’Grady later characterized as “a state of physical and psychological exhaustion.”
A one-time only performance created by O'Grady for "Art Across the Park," curated by Gilbert Coker and Horace Brockington. It was performed in the Loch, a northern section of Central Park, on...
O'Grady's second performance, premiered at Just Above Midtown Gallery on October 31, 1980. In an unexpected turn of events, just one month after Mlle Bourgeoise Noire's invasion of the avant-garde gallery...
O'Grady's first public performance, remains the artist's best known work. The persona first appeared in 1980 under the Futurist dictum that art has the power to change the world and was in...
a series of 26 "cut-out" or "found" newspaper poems made by O'Grady on successive Sundays, from June 5 to November 20, 1977. They were first exhibited to the public at Daniel Reich Temp...
