Iowa Writers Workshop

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Artnet, 2021

At 86, Lorraine O’Grady is experiencing what she calls her “first big break” with the Brooklyn Museum’s retrospective Both/And. For more than four decades, O’Grady has forged a singular path in performance, collage, and critical writing—work that probes identity, inclusion, and the limits of art history. In conversation with Ben Davis, she reflects on her Boston upbringing, her influence on younger artists, and the unexpected moment when a Biden administration post-election ad brought her work into viral circulation.

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The New York Times Style Magazine, 2021

Both Sides Now: In Conversation With Lorraine O’Grady—In an interview with Kate Guadagnino, O’grady discusses a typical day in her life as a working artist and her current interests.

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Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast, 2021

Jarrett Earnest speaks with Lorraine O’Grady as part of a series of artists who are also writers, for David Zwirner’s podcast. They discuss the artist’s “both/and” approach that is crucial to her retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, and what she learned from her exhibition.

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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.

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Duke Up, 2020

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.

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Artforum, 2019

For Artforum, Colby Chamberlain articulates the nuanced, critical value of O’Grady’s “haiku diptychs.” In the review, he traces O’Grady’s deconstruction of print language to the post-Modernist lineage of Benjamin, Derrida, and Mallarmé, which she taught at the School of the Visual Arts around the same time the prints were in production.

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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.

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