1983 curated show, re-presented in Artforum, May 2009 — The artist portfolio that accompanied a survey article on O’Grady’s work by Nick Mauss in a two-article Artforum cover spread combined impressionistic text on her experience curating “The Black and White Show,” 1983, with historically analytic captions for works from the show.
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.
Unpublished exchange — The most comprehensive and focused interview of O’Grady to date, this Q & A by a Duke University doctoral candidate benefited from the slowness of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.
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.
Lorraine O’Grady Has Always Been A Rebel—In this conversation for The New Yorker, Doreen St. Felix and O’Grady discuss the artist’s nonconformist attitudes which she cultivated in childhood, rebelling from a middle class, Black immigrant family. This spirit of rebellion foregrounded O’Grady’s interest in the avant-garde and her penchant for conceptualism.
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.
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?
Malik Gaines — in frieze, “Looking Forward, Looking Back” — Gaines’s end-of-year review looks at Los Angeles and examines the blurring boundaries between art and entertainment. Its pointed commentary on The First and the Last of the Modernists’ image strategies was the most perceptive on the piece to date.