Lorraine O’Grady, the focus of our 2021-22 research season, is joined in conversation by CCA Assistant Professor Sam Vernon. The two artists discuss the impact of Lorraine’s work on a younger generation and on contemporary culture in general. This dynamic, intergenerational discussion addresses topics related to Lorraine’s work and its sphere of influence.
In its 2022 Culture issue, The New York Times Style Magazine spent a day with artists from across disciplines—musicians, chefs, designers, writers, and more—capturing the intimate daily moments that shape their creative lives. Among them was visual artist and writer Lorraine O’Grady, whose practice is deeply rooted in the intersections of art and lived experience.
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!”
A transcribed interview regarding the diasporic experience between Catherine Lord and Lorraine O’Grady printed in her retrospective monograph, Both/And. The two speak on Jean Rhys’ conception of Dominica and debate the concept of post-Blackness.
Malik Gaines talks with O’Grady about the meaning behind her retrospective title, Both/And, through which she signifies an affront to Western binarist thinking. Unlike writing, which O’Grady has foreseeably mastered, she keeps returning to art because there is no correct way to do it – her struggle is a source of joy and motivation.
At 86, Lorraine O’Grady is experiencing what she calls her “first big break” with the Brooklyn Museum’s retrospective Both/And. For more than four decades, O’Grady has forged a singular path in performance, collage, and critical writing—work that probes identity, inclusion, and the limits of art history. In conversation with Ben Davis, she reflects on her Boston upbringing, her influence on younger artists, and the unexpected moment when a Biden administration post-election ad brought her work into viral circulation.
In his critically-acclaimed book, and second ‘anti-canonical reader’ Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths (2021), Adam Pendleton interviews Lorraine O’Grady. The text compiles writings in radical experimental thought and is proceeded by Pendleton’s Black Dada Reader (2017).
Lorraine O’Grady and Andrea Fraser share strategies of institutional critique, and in doing so, the two make legible their differing orientations towards museums. For O’Grady, the museum was a place that refused and ignored her presence, while for Fraser, some decades later, the museum was a site that invited her political resistance.
Independent curator Barbara London interviews Lorraine O’Grady on her involvement at the gallery Just Above Midtown, speaking in detail about her work “Art Is…” and what comes next for the artist following her retrospective Both/And and the Covid-19 pandemic. London shares her enthusiasm for O’Grady’s new performance persona pictured in her work “Announcement Card (Seated Palmate).”
Kate Guadagnino sits down with O’Grady to learn about her day-to-day as a concept-based artist. She speaks honestly about her process of making art by returning to old projects with fresh eyes, sometimes years later, while also including more personal details like her favorite films and her life at Westbeth. The artist notes that “having come to art later in life, [...] I’m out there to make the best possible work and as close to a masterpiece as I can. [...] What I’m trying to do is get as much of myself expressed as possible because there is so little out there that allows for an understanding of the fullness of the Black mind or soul.”
Jarrett Earnest speaks with Lorraine O’Grady as part of a series of artists who are also writers, for David Zwirner’s podcast. They discuss the artist’s “both/and” approach that is crucial to her retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, and what she learned from her exhibition.
Lorraine O’Grady’s long engagement with the diptych comes into focus in her collage series Cutting Out CONYT (1977/2017), a radical distillation of her earliest work, Cutting Out the New York Times. Reworked into what she calls “haiku diptychs,” the series is featured in two solo exhibitions this fall—at Alexander Gray Associates in New York and at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah—as well as in her solo show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Lorraine O’Grady’s career began with bold disruption. Her 1980 performance Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, storming New York galleries in a gown of white gloves and demanding, “Black art must take more risks!”, set the tone for decades of boundary-pushing work. Her recent resurgence includes the 2017 Wellesley Alumnae Achievement Award and the solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
A conversation between artists Lorraine O’Grady and Juliana Huxtable. The dialogue took place by phone from O’Grady and Huxtable’s respective studios in New York City. This is part one of a two-part discussion and the first time the artists have spoken.
Part two of a two-part discussion between artists Lorraine O’Grady and Juliana Huxtable. The dialogue took place by phone from O’Grady and Huxtable’s respective studios in New York City. This is part two of a two-part discussion and the first time the artists have spoken.
Lorraine O'Grady with Jarrett Earnest — In this cover feature, her most important published interview to date, O'Grady discusses Flannery O'Connor as a philosopher of the margins, the archival website, working out emotions via Egyptian sculpture, Michael Jackson's genius, and feminism as a plural noun.
Studio Museum in Harlem Magazine, Summer/Fall issue — Hunt, the curator of O'Grady's solo exhibit of "Art Is..." at the SMH, discusses with her the images the artist still finds most intriguing, her process of gathering the images and more than a quarter of a century later organizing them into a new art work. Also touched on are the assembling of the performers and how they helped shape the piece.
Transcript, "Lorraine O'Grady's Natures," NCRA Canada — This half-hour show, extracted from a longer video interview and produced in Canada for NCRA, is focused on O’Grady’s diptych “The Clearing” and explores issues of sex, nature and love in her work via a mix of the intellectual and the intimate.
[Text in English and Italian] Mousse Magazine, issue 24 — The Mousse interview, done after the Whitney Biennial opening, elaborated on O’Grady’s piece for that exhibit,The First and the Last of the Modernists, and its relation to her decades of teaching Baudelaire and to her work-in-progress Flowers of Evil and Good.
Abbreviated version of a WPS1 radio chat with curator Connie Butler. Published in the P.S.1 Newspaper Special Edition for “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” Winter/Spring, 2008, P.S.1–MOMA, Long Island City, NY.
Recorded by Art Radio WPS1, available online at clocktower.org — Full transcript of a 45-minute conversation between Lorraine O’Grady and curator Connie Butler in WPS1 Art Radio’s broadcast studios two weeks before the WACK! opening at PS1–MOMA, Long Island City, NY.
Unpublished exchange — The most comprehensive and focused interview of O’Grady to date, this Q & A by a Duke University doctoral candidate benefited from the slowness of the email format, the African American feminist scholar’s deep familiarity with O’Grady’s work, and their personal friendship.
In Sojourner: The Women's Forum, November 1996 — Conducted in Cambridge during O’Grady’s one-year residency at the Bunting Institute at Harvard, the interview may have been affected by what she’d felt as adverse treatment there of her diptych The Clearing.
Hatch-Billops Collection, Artists and Influence 1996, vol. 15 — In-depth interview done for the excellent Artist and Influence series produced by Camille Billops and James Hatch for their archive of African American visual and theatre arts.
Unedited transcript for Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties — Montano’s questions on “ritual” cast interesting light on the connection between O’Grady’s early life and her performances. The unedited transcript of the interview contains answers in greater depth on Mlle Bourgeoise Noire and Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline.