For Freedoms, the artist-led political action committee founded by Hank Willis Thomas, announced its landmark “50 State Initiative,” featuring more than 300 artists—including Lorraine O’Grady, J.R., Marilyn Minter, Rashid Johnson, Tania Bruguera, and Theaster Gates, who have created billboards encouraging civic engagement. These works will appear across all 50 states ahead of the November midterm elections.
Alexander Gray Associates presented Cutting Out CONYT, an exhibition of new work by Lorraine O’Grady (b.1934). Featuring a selection of prints from Cutting Out CONYT (1977/2017), in O’Grady’s words, the show revealed her ongoing commitment to “establishing the diptych as a ceaseless conversation of difference.”
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.
In a review of We Wanted A Revolution, Garcia considers the art exhibition as a corrective method for recentering Black women “on the forefront of form and the avant-garde,” and in doing so, she calls for revisions to the art historical canon’s sole emphasis on European male avant-gardists. The article takes a firm stance that the patriarchy cannot be taken down without simultaneously dismantling systemic racism.
Drawing on the Black Feminist scholarship of Hortense Spillers, Beth Capper interprets O’Grady’s performances as representing life lived in the “interstice” between two worlds. The rigorously academic essay situates O’Grady’s work in a lineage of radical Black artists (David Hammons and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to name two) who deal with the limits of language and the politics of visual representation.