Text for the 2012 Paris Triennale English-language website — Written to replace a curatorial text on the Trennale's English website, the text describes the effect of O'Grady's hybrid background on content and form in her work, elaborating this with respect to Miscegenated Family Album, her "novel in space" in the Triennale.
[Text in English and Italian] Mousse Magazine, issue 24 — The Mousse interview, done after the Whitney Biennial opening, elaborated on O’Grady’s piece for that exhibit,The First and the Last of the Modernists, and its relation to her decades of teaching Baudelaire and to her work-in-progress Flowers of Evil and Good.
WACK! audio statement, published in Art Lies #54, Summer 2007 — For WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, the first major museum exhibit of feminist art, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., O’Grady was asked to record an audio statement for the cell-phone tour to explain how her piece related to the show’s theme.
LACMA panel paper, revised for publication in X-Tra — O’Grady recounts an incident from her pre-art life in explanation of her response to the work of the white South African artist.
Art Journal, College Art Association — In this article for Art Journal, Winter 1997, the special issue on performance edited by Martha Wilson, O’Grady focuses first on Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, then discusses its relationship to Miscegenated Family Album, alluding to the advantages and disadvantages of the move from performance to photo installation.
Artist brochure statement for Lorraine O’Grady / MATRIX 127, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, May 21 – Aug 20, 1995. Adapted from “Lorraine O’Grady, conceptual artist,” in Susan Cahan and Zoya Kocur, eds., Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and Routledge, 1996.
Unpublished lecture, Wellesley College — Written shortly after the “Postscript” to “Olympia’s Maid,” this lecture delivered to the Wellesley Round Table, a faculty symposium on Miscegenated Family Album, takes a retrospective look at O’Grady’s earlier life and work through the prism of cultural theory.
Artforum International — O’Grady’s column on the occasion of Basquiat’s first retrospective, at the Whitney Museum, was the first to examine Basquiat’s relation to the black art world. It discusses her personal relationship to Jean-Michel and analyzes the mainstream art world’s “primitivist” responses to his work.
In A-M Journal, Lorraine O’Grady reflects on her life’s work and her “both/and” philosophy, rejecting binary thinking through the symbolic use of the diptych. Paired with Mariane Ibrahim’s insights on her gallery ecosystem, the article illuminates two influential figures reshaping contemporary art through innovation, inclusivity, and critical dialogue.
In her introduction for “Teaching/Learning with Lorraine O’Grady’s Both/And,” Amanda Gilvin offers a unique vantage point for viewing the renowned artist’s multi-decade career. While many have described O’Grady as becoming an artist later in life, Gilvin highlights the links between Wellesley College and the development of O’Grady’s groundbreaking concept of “both/and” over time, revealing that perhaps it was while at the college, her artistry first began to take form.
The Bay State Banner, 2024. Susan Saccocia reviews O’Grady’s “Both/And” at the Davis Museum at O’Grady’s alma mater, Wellesley College. Saccocia describes several of O’Grady’s most prominent works on display in the exhibit and highlights how the show weaves the narrative of O’Grady’s lustrous and expansive career.
WBUR, 2024. Arielle Gray explores the works featured in O’Grady’s “Both/And” exhibit as well as O’Grady’s own writing and words, Arielle Gray. While some may view some of O’Grady’s life as a journey to become an artist, Gray highlights how she always was one. Synthesizing O’Grady’s impact on the art world and her own view of her body of work, Gray finds that it’s not only a critique of or disruption O’Grady seeks, but she crafts a world that shows “all of her multiplicity and nuance.”
The New York Times, 2023. Claude Manet’s “Olympia” served as the central piece in the “Manet/Exhibit” at the Met which brought the painting to New York for the first time. Jasin Farago notes that O’Grady is one of the few critics who has offered attention to the maid, who was actually a French model named Laure.
ICA Boston, 2023. O’Grady’s “The Firm Palm” was included in the “Forecast Form,” the first major group exhibition in the U.S. that focused on Caribbean diaspora. O’Grady’s piece was especially pertinent to the exhibit as it highlights her Boston upbringing in the context of her Jamaican heritage.
The Guardian, 2023. Veronica Esposito’s review of group exhibition, Inheritances, at the Whitney curated by Rujeko Hockley. Along with Ephraim Asili’s 2020 film ‘The Inheritance,” Hockley cites O’Gradys “Rivers, First Draft” as one of the major inspirations for the show as he sought to present challenging works of Black avant-garde art.
The Brooklyn Rail, 2022. Forecast Form — Gervais Marsh’s review of “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora 1990s to Today” examines the metaphorical and literal fluidity of Black and Indigenous Caribbean diasporas. O’Grady’s The Fir-Palm and The Strange Taxi are highlighted as reminders of O’Grady’s Jamaican lineage.
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.
The New Yorker’s “This Week” section announces O’Grady’s solo retrospective, “Both/And,” set to open the Brooklyn Museum the following week.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For Those Who Will Know—In her introduction for O’Grady’s “Writing in Space,” the first collection of the artist’s writing, Aruna D’Souza illuminates the throughline of forward-thinking found in O’Grady’s groundbreaking art. Resisting the simple and rigid classifications that box in many women and Black artists, O’Grady has continuously complicated and challenged cultural notions of binarism. This provocation has taken form in all modes of her practices—from her seminal performance of alter ego Mlle Bourgeoise Noir to the recurrent diptychs bridging unexpected figures like Michael Jackson and Charles Baudelaire. D’Souza delineates how these works are foregrounded by O’Grady’s training as a writer.
"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."
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."
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.
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.
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."
Unpublished article on New Worlds — The unpublished article by Gosine, a York University (Toronto) professor who'd written earlier on hybridity in O'Grady's work, is a perceptive and detailed analysis of the subject's treatment in her New Worlds show at Alexander Gray, NY.
Jeu de Paume invited blog — Rice's familiarity with O'Grady's work over 30 years results in a theoretically astute and rotundly feminist look at how New Worlds extends the artist's ongoing critique of cultural stability from the lens of the hybridized political-personal and the colonized body.
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.
Blues for Smoke, Museum of Contemporary Art, LA — In a catalogue with the improvisational quality of the music, the final section of Blues for Smoke curator Simpson's essay "This Air" is titled "The Clearing," from a piece by O'Grady of that name in the exhibit, and discusses how the piece echoes the show's themes.
A Generous Medium: Photography at Wellesley, 1972-2012 — The curator of the Wellesley Davis Museum's 1994 exhibit Body As Measure, in which Miscegenated Family Album was first shown, looks back movingly on her encounter with the work in the artist's studio and on the complexities of purchasing work by an alumna.
Lorraine O’Grady’s Landscape — In a new magazine devoted to artists from the Caribbean and its diaspora, a young Trinidadian-Canadian professor at Toronto’s York University sheds light on the role of hybridity in Landscape (Western Hemisphere) and its complementary work The Clearing.
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.
Unpublished slide lecture, A Postmortem on Postmodernism? — Prior to O’Grady’s publication of “Olympia’s Maid,” it tellingly inflects T. Feucht-Haviar’s later paper on subjectivity as a critical category opposing regimes of knowledge acquisition and production based in compromised forms of power relations.