The Diptych vs the Triptych, 1998
Unpublished statement — Excerpt from a conversation between Lorraine O’Grady and a studio visitor, 9.12.98.
nature vs culture
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Thoughts on Diaspora and Hybridity, 1994
Unpublished lecture, Wellesley College — Written shortly after the “Postscript” to “Olympia’s Maid,” this lecture delivered to the Wellesley Round Table, a faculty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.
diaspora Ancient Egypt Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline sibling rivalry Olympia's Maid Wellesley College Gayatri Spivak artistic process post-modernism black female subjectivity performance art 1994 hybridity historiography The Dual Soul nature vs culture autobiography the Caribbean Miscegenated Family album race and class
Olympia’s Maid, 1992, 1994
Afterimage 20, 1992; expanded, New Feminist Criticism, 1994 — This first-ever article of cultural criticism on the black female body was to prove germinal and continues to be widely referenced in scholarly and other works. Occasionally controversial, it has been frequently anthologized, most recently in Amelia Jones, ed, The Feminism and Cultural Reader, Routledge.
Judith Wilson post-modernism religion and spirituality 1994 The Strange Taxi 1992 poststructuralism nature vs culture black female subjectivity black women artists black writers Stuart Hall erasure/invisibility psychoanalysis race and class Olympia's Maid sex and sexuality white feminism dance Gayatri Spivak
Black Women Film Directors, 1992
Film column, Artforum, January 1992 — Written during a tentative “break-through” year for black women film directors, the article was a search for answers to the question, “Why are there so few even now?” It found the situation for black women to be an exaggeration of that for women in general.
ICA Boston, 2023
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.
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.”
ArtNet, 2012
Emily Nathan, The New York List — Analysis of New Worlds focusing on how the works' resistance of "easy classification" and their straddling of "artificial divides of genre and type" serve to replicate O'Grady's thoughts on the contemporary world, one "shaped and inflected by miscegenation."
Andil Gosine, 2012
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.
Shelley Rice, 2012
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.
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.
Interview by Laura Cottingham, 1995
Hatch-Billops Collection, Artists and Influence 1996, vol. 15 — In-depth interview done for the excellent Artist and Influence series produced by Camille Billops and James Hatch for their archive of African American visual and theatre arts.
performance art religion and spirituality black avant-garde Adrian Piper autobiography 1995 Mlle Bourgeoise Noire nature vs culture Miscegenated Family album the Caribbean rock criticism race and class The Clearing sex and sexuality Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline Ancient Egypt black female subjectivity Olympia's Maid sibling rivalry white feminism Judith Wilson the Black and White Show Lucy Lippard tokenism Just Above Midtown