Email Q & A with Artforum Editor, 2009
O’Grady used the margin comments of her Artforum editor on “The Black and White Show” in part as an opportunity for background clarification on the situation of race in the 1980s art world.
art-world racism
200
Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 1980-81, Synopsis 2007
Posted to the moca.org WACK site — O’Grady posted this brief synopsis of the performance and its background on the WACK! exhibit’s excellent website. Significantly, she also posted 13 largely unknown photos-with-captions documenting the performance, which historically had been victim to two iconic images. Lacking a full context, they had become empty signifiers.
The 1980s: An Internet Conference, 2005
Moderated online by Maurice Berger — O’Grady’s replies to Berger’s questions, both reproduced here, were extensive. The conference, with 30 posters and hosted on the Georgia O’Keefe Museum website, provided an opportune moment to re-think her 80s work in its larger historical context.
The Presence that Signals an Absence, 1993
Catalogue Essay, Coming to Power, David Zwirner Gallery — Written for the unpublished, photocopied catalogue of Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-plicit Art by Women, curated by Ellen Cantor and presented by David Zwirner Gallery and Simon Watson/The Contemporary, NYC, the essay examines O’Grady’s inclusion in the show and responses to her diptych The Clearing.
Art in America, 1984
Unpublished letter re “Report from the East Village” — Unpublished letter re the omission of Kenkeleba Gallery and O’Grady’s The Black and White Show from the feature section, “Report from the East Village: Slouching Toward Avenue D,” in Art in America, Vol 72 No 6 (Summer 1984). Receipt not acknowledged.
Winston-Salem Journal, 2022
Tom Patterson forms a based chronology of O'Grady's diverse range of careers. He notes her positions as an intelligence analyst for the federal government and a freelance writer for Rolling Stone, all of which she held before she was 40 years old. He studies her persona “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire” in her pivot to start an art practice in the latter half of her life.
Both/And Catalogue, 2021
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.
ARTnews, 2021
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.
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.
language academia radicalism art-world racism 2021 women artists art market Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O'Grady and the Art of Language art institutions black women artists Stephanie Sparling Williams institutional critique Cutting Out The New York Times Black subjectivity class privilege risk ideology practice critical race theory soul both/and redux feminism retrospective Cutting Out CONYT Brooklyn Museum Msc poetry recuperation
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.
The Village Voice hybridity other media Rolling Stone the Black and White Show becoming an artist Announcement of a New Persona (Performances to Come!) Just Above Midtown erasure/invisibility 2021 Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Cutting Out The New York Times Cutting Out CONYT Art Is... Wellesley College art institutions Miscegenated Family album Conceptualism School of Visual Arts Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline Jamaica cat o’nine tails art-world racism both/and Caribbean retrospective performance art Brooklyn Museum interdisciplinary
New York Vulture, 2021
Jillian Steinhauer reviews O'Grady's retrospective exhibition “Both/And” at the Brooklyn Museum. The article highlights O'Grady's pioneering work in performance art and her exploration of race, gender, and identity in her practice. Steinhauer describes O'Grady's personal history, including her West Indian heritage, her education, and her career as a writer before she turned to art, another aspect of her life that significantly informs her art practice.
black avant-garde Black feminism Mlle Bourgeoise Noire colonialism Art Is... both/and writing in space Brooklyn Museum Boston Iowa Writers Workshop art-world racism Guerilla Gurls Lucy Lippard performance becoming an artist Linda Goode Bryant erasure/invisibility Just Above Midtown Cutting Out The New York Times
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.
erasure Aruna d’Souza The Clearing Family Portrait 1 (Formal Body is the Ground of My Experience anti-Blackness Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline Composed) western cultural hegemony Catherine Morris Olympia's Maid Cutting Out The New York Times hybridity modernity Boston Egypt the Black and White Show The Dinner Party art-world racism Jamaica Just Above Midtown Outlaw Aesthetics Caribbean both/and Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Leon-Gontran Damas displacement Announcement of a New Persona (Performances to Come!) Art Is... The New Museum New York Times 2021 Miscegenated Family album Hortense Spillers becoming an artist Cutting Out CONYT photography Nefertiti’s Sister Linda Goode Bryant language diaspora seriality Harlem
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.
Egypt coloniality writing in space Conceptualism literature Olympia's Maid Black feminism William Pope. L art-world racism both/and hybridity performance art Brooklyn Museum black avant-garde displacement formalism diptych becoming an artist 2021 political art abstraction practice Mlle Bourgeoise Noire western cultural hegemony anti-Blackness Art Is... poststructuralism conversation aesthetics museums diaspora
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.
Joe Biden art-world racism guerilla performance Caribbean Art Is… Rivers (First Draft) Landscape (Western Hemisphere) black writers both/and hybridity retrospective Just Above Midtown Brooklyn Museum black avant-garde Announcement of a New Persona (Performances to Come!) Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 2021 Miscegenated Family album Aruna d’Souza writing in space
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.
Strange Taxi diaspora Egypt Concrete poetry Surrealism both/and Judy Chicago Olympia's Maid Brooklyn Museum Eurocentrism white feminism Rolling Stone refusal Boston 2021 hybridity art-world racism Cutting Out CONYT Just Above Midtown Caribbean School of Visual Arts Rivers First Draft Landscape (Western Hemisphere) Aruna d’Souza Mlle Bourgeoise Noire western cultural hegemony Joe Biden Art Is... Cutting Out The New York Times Hugh Hefner Miscegenated Family album Wellesley College
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.
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.
retrospective art-world racism Brooklyn Museum marginalization The Village Voice interdisciplinary Rolling Stone other media 2021 becoming an artist Announcement Card 2 (Spike with Sword abstraction Fighting) erasure/invisibility identity politics race and class second-wave feminism hybridity Conceptualism political art both/and diaspora
Experience Magazine, 2019
Heather Kapplow conducts a formal analysis of O’Grady’s performance persona, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, in an attempt to bridge her pioneering artwork of the 1980s with the activism of Black public figures in the 2010s.
Hyperallergic, 2018
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.
Egypt SCAD Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Cutting Out CONYT SCAD Museum Art Is... The New York Times Wellelsey College art-world racism segregation the news Landscape (Western Hemisphere) race and politics Linda Goode Bryant Iowa Writers Workshop representation 2018 black women artists From Me to Them to Me Again western cultural hegemony Afro-Caribbean hybridity Cutting Out The New York Times Irish Just Above Midtown post-black Savannah College of Art and Design black avant-garde
The Drama Review, 2018
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.
representation 2018 Just Above Midtown David Hammons the instertice black avant-garde Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution interupption political art black women artists limits of representation Mlle Bourgeoise Noire western cultural hegemony in between Art Is... sex and sexuality feminism academic journal Miscegenated Family album aesthetics black female subjectivity juxtaposition Egypt the body Black feminism Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline Hortense Spillers hybridity art-world racism refusal Jean-Michel Basquiat
Hyperallergic, 2017
Upon the opening of the group exhibition We Wanted A Revolution, Jessica Bell Brown celebrates the Black female artists-activists who made space to create their own art world in the 1970s and 80s, including Lorraine O’Grady, Linda Goode-Bryant, and Senga Nengudi. Brown reminds her audience that the work doesn’t stop at this exhibition; she strongly urges museums to acquire the exhibited pieces into their permanent collections.
Brooklyn Museum AfriCOBRA white feminism radicalism Combahee River Collective art-world racism We Wanted A Revolution Eileen Harris Norton performance art Maren Hassinger Kellie Jones Linda Goode Bryant 1960s Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 Harlem Women’s Liberation Toni Morrison Studio Z 1970s Senga Nengudi AIR Gallery Just Above Midtown 2017 Black liberation black avant-garde black women artists Women Students and Artists for Black Liberation Mlle Bourgeoise Noire black writers protest 1980s
Art In America, 2016
Kirsten Swenson reviews “Lorraine O’Grady” at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts — Notes uncanny intersections of O’Grady’s early works with contemporary events. Concludes, “Now, we are beginning to see her art.”
Stedelijk Studies #3, 2016
"Frame Me": Speaking Out of Turn and Lorraine O'Grady's Alien Avant-Garde — In the first major academic article on O'Grady, Stephanie Sparling Williams, using both the definition of "alien" as stranger and the Brechtian "alienation effect," provides a first line of theorization, stating: "As both alien and avant-garde, [it paves] the way for these two terms to be theorized in close proximity as a distinctive position from which to deploy strategic visibility and voice."
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.
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.
Hyperallergic, 2013
Animating the Archive: Black Performance Art's Radical Presence – Alexis Clements' review of "Radical Presence" at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU, discusses the ways in which O'Grady's photo-document installation of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire enables one to imagine at least in part what it might have been like to be present during the performance.
Ben Davis, 2013
Piece on Basquiat referencing O'Grady's 1993 Artforum article — ArtInfo executive editor Ben Davis's feature, "Saving Basquiat," points to O'Grady's 1993 Artforum article and highlights the question it raised: Could knowing black fine artists have saved him?
Wellesley Magazine, 2013
Lisa Scanlon on O'Grady's archive at Wellesley College — Associate editor Scanlon, writing on the newly opened Lorrraine O'Grady Papers, the College's first major alumnae archives, calls the collection a means to preserve the records of the artist's "permanent rebellion."
diaspora sibling rivalry Olympia's Maid Wellesley College art-world racism performance art black female subjectivity Landscape (Western Hemisphere) BodyGround 2012 Just Above Midtown art market autobiography Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution Mlle Bourgeoise Noire the Caribbean Miscegenated Family album video art
Art Fag City, 2012
Alana Chloe Esposito, Unnatural Attitudes — A sensitive summary of O'Grady's biography and its effect on her art, Esposito's piece sees the work as emerging from the artist's pressure to understand and become herself.
diaspora mother art-world racism The Whitney Museum performance art Girls Latin School Michael Jackson Landscape (Western Hemisphere) black female subjectivity BodyGround The First and the Last of the Modernists 2012 Just Above Midtown Charles Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval autobiography the Caribbean Mlle Bourgeoise Noire video art
Radio Interview by Andil Gosine, 2010
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.
Modern Painters, 2008
Miscegenated Family Album, at Alexander Gray Associates, NYC — Discussion of framing as a technique of meaning in O’Grady’s conceptual photo-installation.
PS1 newspaper interview, 2008
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.
WPS1 chat with Connie Butler, 2008
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.
Email Q & A with Courtney Baker, 1998
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.
hybridity performance art Courntey Baker Jean-Michel Basquiat 1998 the Black and White Show historiography Just Above Midtown art market black avant-garde black women artists Rivers First Draft black writers autobiography erasure/invisibility Mlle Bourgeoise Noire race and class Art Is... Ancient Egypt black female subjectivity Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline sibling rivalry art-world racism unpublished
Interview by Theo Davis, 1996
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.
Art Is... erasure/invisibility Miscegenated Family album sex and sexuality Surrealism Ancient Egypt The Clearing sibling rivalry Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline Girls Latin School Olympia's Maid religion and spirituality black female subjectivity Gayatri Spivak Bunting Institute art-world racism autobiography Lucy Lippard political art performance art Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 1996
Calvin Reid, 1993
A West Indian Yankee in Queen Nefertiti’s Court — The first critical article on O'Grady's work as a whole, and still one of the best. Published in New Observations #97: COLOR. September/October 1993. Special issue, edited by ADRIAN PIPER.
black female subjectivity The Fir-Palm Wellesley College The Clearing Girls Latin School Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline INTAR Gallery hybridity art-world racism Lilith Sends Out the Destroyers Just Above Midtown Lucy Lippard Gaze and Dream black avant-garde performance art autobiography Adrian Piper Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 1993 Art Is... the Caribbean diaspora Ancient Egypt writing in space mother
ARTS Magazine, 1991
Gretchen Faust, New York in Review — Excellent review of O'Grady's first solo exhibit, at INTAR Gallery. Faust confesses: "Every once and awhile I come across a show that really demands more time and space consideration." Special focus on performance docs in the photomontage show.
Interview by Linda Montano, 1986
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.