In the second of our new series about artworks by women that have relevance to today’s news, our writer pays tribute to an artist who, like the England Women’s football team, set out to inspire young girls
Both Sides Now: In Conversation With Lorraine OâGrady
Lorraine OâGrady outside of Manhattanâs Westbeth Artistsâ Housing, where she lives and works.Credit.Tiffany L. Clark
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Both Sides Now: In Conversation With Lorraine OâGrady
On the eve of her first major retrospective, the artist talks about her past, her process and the benefit of criticism.
Lorraine OâGrady outside of Manhattanâs Westbeth Artistsâ Housing, where she lives and works.Credit.Tiffany L. Clark
Published Feb. 22, 2021Updated March 1, 2021
rearranging them into lines of poetry, which she glued, mostly slantwise, onto sheets of rag paper: âDinner is reserved for/Twin Speech: A Language of Their Ownâ reads one spliced fragment. She was in her early 40s. Fifteen years earlier, OâGrady had worked as an intelligence analyst for the federal government. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, she was tasked with reading around 10 international newspapers a day and,
Tourmaline,
Morning Cloak, 2020, dye sublimation print, 29 1/2 × 30 .
OVER NEARLY two decades of political organizing, archival research, writing, and art-making, Tourmaline has demonstrated that abolition, Black trans liberation, and abundant pleasure are interwoven, inseparable projects. In her first solo exhibition, “Pleasure Garden,” up through January 31 at Chapter NY’s Madison Street pop-up location, Tourmaline debuts a series of five photographic self-portraits alongside
Salacia, a cinematic account of Mary Jones, a Black trans sex worker who lived in New York in the 1830s. The works weave together sites as varied as nineteenth-century Black-owned pleasure gardens, the free Black land-owning community of Seneca Village, outer space, and the Hudson River Piers, asserting that all these moments of “freedom dreaming” comingle in the present. The day before Christmas, we sat down over Zoom to discuss time-travel-y dreams, the Concord grapes you may not know are
A still from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris s video showing diverse Americans holding up a golden frame, which was inspired by Lorraine O’Grady s 1983 performance Art Is…
Each December, as we review the events of the previous 11 months, it is intriguing to see art being swept along on, or trying to ride, the waves of geopolitics. But this year I wondered: how could art respond to the scale of the pandemic, George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing protests? I’ve commented earlier in this column that artists have no duty to respond to global events; that it is enough to survive, to keep making work.