Lorraine O’Grady brings critically acclaimed Both/And exhibit to the Davis Museum

Lorraine O’Grady ‘55, a critically acclaimed contemporary artist and cultural critic, returns to the Boston area with her retrospective exhibition Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And. This landmark exhibition will coincide with a performance art series, both of which are free and open to the public

Both/And will be on view at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College from February 8 to June 2, 2024. The Museum will be open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., beginning Feb. 9.

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is the first major career survey of the renowned conceptual artist whose work has long challenged prevailing understandings around gender, race, and class. Originally organized by the Brooklyn Museum in March 2021, the exhibition charts the development of O’Grady’s artistic oeuvre, which spans collage, photo-installation, performance, and video. It brings focus to the artist’s skillful subversion of the “either/or” logic inherent in the Western philosophical canon, and explores her longstanding commitment to the reasoning of “both/and.” 

O’Grady’s work deals with a range of overlapping themes: Black female subjectivity in Western modernity and artistic modernism; hybridity and diasporic experience; multiplicity and selfhood; colonialism and slavery; and intersectional feminist theory and praxis. Through her deployment of the diptych as both an artistic and conceptual strategy, O’Grady calls for an anti-hierarchical approach to difference within the categories of Black and white, self, and other, West and non-West, and past and present.

As a Black woman, a native New Englander and child of Caribbean parents, O’Grady has made art as a means of self-exploration as well as cultural critique. Born in Boston to Jamaican parents, she was educated at the Girls Latin School before studying economics and Spanish literature at Wellesley College (class of 1955). O’Grady became the first Wellesley graduate to pass the U.S. Federal Management intern exam, after which she received a coveted job at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Turning to artmaking in the 1970s, she first exhibited her work at Wellesley in 1994 as part of the Body as Measure exhibition. The Davis Museum acquired her “Sisters” quadriptych from that show.

Photo credit: Lorraine O'Grady (American, born 1934). Art Is . . . (Girl Pointing), 1983/2009. Chromogenic photograph in 40 parts, 20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.64 cm). Edition of 8 plus 1 artist’s proof. © 2023 Lorraine O’Grady/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

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