Rivers and Just Above Midtown, 2013, 2015
Text read at MOMA's Now Dig This! symposium — A meditation on why Rivers, First Draft might not have existed without the Just Above Midtown Gallery’s challenging and supportive environment.
2015
525
Alexander Gray Associates, 2015
Alexander Gray Associates presented early foundational works by Lorraine O’Grady, featuring the collage series Cutting Out The New York Times (1977/2015) and the photographic installation Rivers, First Draft (1982/2015). These projects mark O’Grady’s development of a personal and political artistic voice, transforming public language into intimate reflections on identity and documenting a one-time Central Park performance that intertwined her Caribbean and New England heritages.
Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, 2015
EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean, curated by Claire Tancons and Krista Thompson, examines how Carnival’s masquerade traditions shape contemporary performance in the Caribbean and its diasporas. Built around nine commissioned performances staged during the 2014 Carnival season across multiple cities, the exhibition highlights artistic practices rooted in the histories of slavery, colonialism, and migration. Featuring artists including Lorraine O’Grady, it brings together material traces, film, and photography documenting these street-based works.
Hyperallergic, 2015
A Walk Through the World of Lorraine O'Grady — Heather Kapplow, the Boston reviewer, replicates O'Grady's working method by walking backwards, turning the exhibit itself into a diptych, video on one side, wall works on the other, setting in motion a permanent back-and-forth questioning and answering between the two so that the only resolution is to embrace a permanent, un-hierarchized equivalence.
Interview with Amanda Hunt, 2015
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.
Boston Globe, 2015
Cate McQuaid on "Where Margins Become Centers" — In this enthusiastic review of the Carpenter Center show, which she later discussed further in an end-of-year column on Boston's galleries, the award-winning critic declares that, after the early performances, O'Grady's work "grew more precise and more searing."
Harvard University, 2015
Carpenter Center Exhibition Booklet — One reviewer called it an "Indispensable brochure." Besides checklist and illustrations, Lorraine O'Grady: Where Margins Become Centers contains an incisive essay by the CCVA's curator James Voorhies, an article by O'Grady and interview by Cecilia Alemani,, as well as Andil Gosine's foundational essay, "Lorraine O'Grady's New Worlds."
Miscegenated Family album Charles Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval the Caribbean diaspora western cultural hegemony The Fir-Palm sex and sexuality The Clearing Ancient Egypt modernism video art Michael Jackson sibling rivalry Landscape (Western Hemisphere) mother The First and the Last of the Modernists hybridity Where Margins Become Centers autobiography 2015
Art in America, 2015
Cathy Lebowitz on "En Mas'" — Leibowitz discusses O'Grady's "Looking for a Headdress" video and installation as a mimicry of the relation of the diaspora to its originary culture and indicates that its informal density accomplishes a great deal efficiently.
Hyperallergic on Art Is…, 2015
Louis Bury on "Art Is..." — Bury's lengthy and magisterial review is a model of intellectual attention to what is being seen — both inside and outside the frame. Beginning with the freedom of the piece's title, it examines framing as form, content and metaphor, and illluminates police presence and the relation of viewer to viewed.
Jody B. Cutler, 2015
Blog entry on "Art Is..." at the Studio Museum in Harlem — This brief review by an art historian frames "Art Is..." as a "meta-art proposition" and draws interesting parallels to works by later black artists.
Art Agenda, 2015
Alan Gilbert review of Lorraine O'Grady at Alexander Gray — The editor of the College Art Association's caa.reviews, through a close formal description of "Cutting Out the New York Times," mimicked by that of the "Rivers, First Draft" wall installation, points to how their form provides an associative logic needed to make sense of the individuation process unfolding on the wall.
New York Times, 2015
Holland Cotter, Art & Design — Cotter's review of O'Grady's exhibit at Alexander Gray focuses on her use of collage in both "Cutting Out the New York Times" and "Rivers, First Draft" as a method of shaping her complex history.
burnaway.org, 2015
Feature on "EN MAS': Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean" — Reviewer Rebecca Lee Reynolds displays keen appreciation of the format of O'Grady's "reaction video," her commission for "EN MAS," which opened at CAC New Orleans before its traveling tour to the National Galleries of the Cayman Isalnds and of The Bahamas, plus centers of the diaspora.