Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Lorraine O’Grady: Body Is the Ground of My Experience, featuring the artist’s pivotal 1991 black-and-white photomontages. Merging Surrealist strategies with O’Grady’s incisive exploration of aesthetics, representation, and cultural history, these diptychs mark a key transition from performance to wall-based work and distill the politically and personally radical ideas that have shaped her career.
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.”
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.
Alexander Gray Associates presented Lorraine O’Grady: New Worlds, featuring the video Landscape (Western Hemisphere) (2011) alongside two photomontages from her BodyGround series. In works such as The Fir-Palm and The Clearing, O’Grady examines cultural hybridity, colonial histories, and the intertwined nature of identity and landscape. Landscape (Western Hemisphere) extends this exploration by transforming the artist’s own hair into a shifting terrain, set against sounds from across the Americas. Together, these pieces articulate O’Grady’s call for a “miscegenated” way of thinking—one that fully reckons with the hybrid world we inhabit.
Lorraine O’Grady’s Miscegenated Family Album (1994) is a 16-part photo-installation that pairs images from her family history with iconic Ancient Egyptian sculptures. Originating from her 1980 performance Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, the diptychs draw striking parallels between personal memory and historical narrative. Shown widely at institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Wadsworth Atheneum, its presentation at Alexander Gray Associates marked the first full showing of the series in New York.
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.