Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel, is O’Grady’s most recent artistic persona. The Knight—together with attendants Pitchy-Patchy, her squire, and Rociavant, her horse—has set out to finish what her progenitor Mlle Bourgeoise Noire began 40 years earlier.
Lorraine O’Grady, a pioneering African-American conceptual artist, is celebrated in her first French solo exhibition at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery. Spanning four decades, the show features iconic works like Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, Rivers, First Draft, and The Knight series, revealing her profound engagement with identity, hybridity, and cultural critique.
O’Grady’s “Body is the Ground Experience” was featured in Artnews’ list of must-see shows for the inaugural New York Art Week. The exhibit was the first time it had shown in 30 years and was based on O’Grady’s interest in Surrealism.
Siddhartha Mitter interviews Simone Leigh on Sovereignty, her installation for the U.S. Pavillion at the Venice Biennale. Leigh’s mentor, O’Grady, expresses enthusiasm for the symposium Loophole of Retreat that will accompany the show in October 2022.
Lorraine O’Grady’s exhibition of diptych photographs, “Body Is the Ground of My Experience,” is included in a list of standout shows in the first-ever New York Art Week. Thirty years after the photographs were first made, the works are re-contextualized following the artist’s 2021 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, “Both/And.”
Loring Knoblauch considers Body Is The Ground of My Experience (1991/2019) as a “reprise” of O’Grady’s retrospective Both/And, exhibited the year prior. She suggests that the show is vital to understanding O’Grady’s late photographic prints.
Ela Bittencourt delivers polished prose after visiting Body Is The Ground of My Experience on view at Alexander Gray Associates in 2022. Notably, she praises O’Grady’s hybrid mode of making critique into a pleasurable venture.
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.
Frieze, 2016. In an essay interrogating uses of racial representation and depiction in photography, Evan Moffitt highlights O’Grady’s “Art Is…” 1983 performance which used a literal frame to metaphorically reframe thoughts on what constitutes art and who is allowed to participate in its creation.