ECHO DELAY REVERB: American Art, Francophone Thought at the Palais de Tokyo traces how ideas associated with “French Theory”—from Barthes and Derrida to Foucault—have subtly shaped American art. Curated by Naomi Beckwith and collaborators, the exhibition shows how these concepts reverberated across studios and cultural spaces, appearing less as direct illustrations of theory and more as shifting echoes that artists absorbed, transformed, and set into motion.
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.
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.
Christina Sharpe writes a crucial essay upon the publishing of Lorraine O’Grady’s collected writings and interviews, entitled Writing in Space, suggesting that the artist’s “fierce intelligence, wit and humor, curiosity, anger” is the grist for social revolution.