Unpublished statement, for Tony Whitfield — A letter to Tony Whitfield in preparation for Just Above Midtown’s Afro- Pop catalogue interview is O’Grady’s most self-conscious to that point. Experiencing a lack of clear precedents for her work, in it she attempts to theorize her relationship to performance art and the paucity of role models, and to face the question of the audience for black avant-garde art.
Heresies #15: Racism Is the Issue — Published in the Heresies collective’s journal, this was O’Grady’s first attempt to deal publicly with issues of black female subjectivity. It is based firmly in personal anecdote and psychological description rather than the more theoretical analysis she would later employ.
In his critically-acclaimed book, and second ‘anti-canonical reader’ Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths (2021), Adam Pendleton interviews Lorraine O’Grady. The text compiles writings in radical experimental thought and is proceeded by Pendleton’s Black Dada Reader (2017).