Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And Exhibition

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is the first retrospective of an artist who has been a critical voice in performance, conceptual, and feminist art for more than four decades. Lorraine O’Grady became an artist at age forty-five, after successful careers in the U.S. Departments of State and Labor, professional translating, rock criticism, and teaching French literature and art. She jokes that because she came to her artistic career late in life, she “only had time for masterpieces.”

O’Grady’s work revolves around a consistent set of themes: Black female subjectivity and Black feminism; hybridity and diaspora; the unspoken aftermath of slavery in the Western Hemisphere; the contradictions and complications of her upbringing in Boston as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants; and the impossibility of separating the personal from the political, or the self from history. The artist’s practice is driven by a desire to replace Western “either/or” thinking—which O’Grady sees as the basis of the inequalities that structure our world—with the concept of “both/and.” By putting seeming contradictions into play and refusing the possibility of resolution, O’Grady seeks to undermine the power and hierarchy implied by oppositions like Black and white, self and other, West and non-West, and past and present.

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is organized by Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, and writer Aruna D’Souza with Jenee-Daria Strand, Curatorial Assistant, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.