2021

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Brooklyn Museum, 2021

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is the first career retrospective of a groundbreaking figure in performance, conceptual, and feminist art. Rejecting either/or thinking in favor of a fluid “both/and,” O’Grady draws on her own experience of racial hybridity to illuminate how Blackness has always been central to Western modernism. Featuring twelve major projects and a new installation, the exhibition spans four decades of work and extends across the museum, underscoring O’Grady’s sustained challenge to art-historical omissions and institutional inequities, an approach that has profoundly influenced a new generation of artists and thinkers.

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Aware, 2022

For Aware’s index of worm artists, Stephanie Sparling Williams writes on O’Grady’s unique path to becoming an artist from US intelligence analyst, teacher, translator, and critic to avant-garde performances and photo installations.

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University of California Press, 2021

UC Press listing for Stephanie Sparling Williams’ “Speaking Out of Turn,” which charts O’Grady’s use of language and direct address to carve out space in an art world that had yet to understand her voice. The book argues for O’Grady’s work to be situated within the history of American conceptualism.

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CCA Newsroom, 2021

The launch of The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s “Lorraine O’Grady Film Club,” which began with Julie Dash’s short film Illusions.

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Collector Daily, 2021

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And @Brooklyn Museum—Loring Knoblauch provides a comprehensive review of O’Grady’s Both/And retrospective offering a detailed listing of the artworks displayed, and the mapping of the show. Looking closely at each component presented at the Brooklyn Museum, Knoblauch finds that what emerges is the importance of conceptualism and idea-driven practices to O’Grady’s work.

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Artforum, 2021

Risk Everything—Ahead of the “Both/And” retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, Catherinne Damman writes an insightful essay on the varied art and career of O’Grady. Of her many practices, Damman sees “risk as [O’Grady’s] primary medium,” foregoing easy stratifications in favor of deep inquiry and interrogation of the structures that bind.

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Artbook, 2021

Artbook’s listing for “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And”, the accompanying book to O’Grady’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021. The book surveys O’Grady’s work spanning over four decades of her major works and showcases, “Announcement”, her new persona and performance piece.

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The Philadelphia Tribune, 2021

In a review of the retrospective Both/And, Siddhartha Mitter sings the praises of O’Grady’s deft political critique. Having developed a rapport with the artist through his repeated reviews of her work, he quotes the artist in conversation: “I am making incisions on the skin of culture” […] “it is work I’ll be doing for the rest of my life.”

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Ithaca Times, 2021

G.M. Burns reviews Stephanie Sparling Williams’ new book, Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Language, which he marks as crucial in contextualizing O’Grady’s artistry. The article also includes an interview with Dr. Williams that explores her interest in engaging the artist’s work.

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Observer, 2021

Anni Irish offers an overview of O’Grady’s art practice in consideration of her retrospective, Both/And, focusing on key conceptual stakes, such as the artist’s interest in language as form.

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Artforum, 2021

Upon the opening of O’Grady’s retrospective Both/And, Artforum devotes much of its March 2021 issue to her prolific art practice. Catherine Damman provides a decades-long overview of her career, Mira Dayal focuses on Miscegenated Family Album, and David Fiasco interviews the artist on new works in progress.

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Art in America, 2021

Christina Sharpe writes a crucial essay upon the publishing of Lorraine O’Grady’s collected writings and interviews, entitled Writing in Space, suggesting that the artist’s “fierce intelligence, wit and humor, curiosity, anger” is the grist for social revolution.

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Vogue, 2021

After a visit to O’Grady’s retrospective Both/And, Cassidy George commends the artist’s life’s work: to demand art institutions to prioritize inclusion.

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New York Times, 2021

Holland Cotter, a chronic reviewer of O’Grady’s work, calls attention to the exhibition design of her retrospective, Both/And. She remarks on how the artist’s pervasive installation, which weaves throughout the museum, encourages viewers to reconsider the institution’s permanent collection through a critical lens.

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Boston Globe, 2021

In light of O’Grady’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, Murray Whyte argues for the artist’s embrace of cultural hybridity through an in-depth analysis of her art practice. Specifically, she considers how O’Grady’s insistence to be “both/and” – to contain multiple backgrounds at the same time, refusing a singular identity – could usher in the next generation of interdisciplinary, multicultural artists.

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Artforum, 2021

O’Grady’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, Both/And, receives a sincere note of respect on Jack Bankowsky’s top ten exhibitions seen in 2021.

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Artforum, 2021

In a one-paragraph review of Both/And, Lynne Cooke includes O’Grady’s retrospective in her highlights of 2021, noting the artist’s “fiercely intelligent, subversive” defiance of race-based exclusion in the New York art world and Second-wave feminist movement.

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New York Times, 2021

O’Grady’s retrospective Both/And (and her publication Writing in Space) receive an honorable mention in Holland Cotter and Roberta Smith’s roundup of 2021’s most notable art exhibitions.

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