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 Sections 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, as she likes to say, âat a certain point, words just became gelatinous.â But from that experience OâGrady was able to extract new meaning out of language. âI did a poem a week, and when I got to the four-month mark, they started taking off, and I could tell something was happening,â she says, though the knowledge that her own ideas could carry her from one place or plane to the next must have already been familiar. In addition to her time in Washington