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Lorraine O'Grady: Rivers, First Draft: The Woman in White eats coconut and looks away from the action

Lorraine O'Grady (American, born 1934). Rivers, First Draft: The Woman in the White Kitchen tastes her coconut, 1982/2015. Digital chromogenic print from Kodachrome 35mm slides in 48 parts, 16 × 20 in. (40.64 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 8 + 2 AP. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Contact us at exhibitions@brooklynmuseum.org if you are interested in bringing this exhibition or others to your institution.

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is the first retrospective of one of the most significant contemporary figures working in performance, conceptual, and feminist art. Lorraine O’Grady replaces either/or ways of thinking with the endless loop of “both/and,” challenging the fixed positions of self and other, here and there, now and then, all while reflecting on the poignancy of lives lived within dualistic frameworks. The artist addresses her own experience as a person marked by racial hybridity―her family histories connect the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and the United States―who is nonetheless definitively a Black woman. Through her exploration of legacies of cultural interconnection and reciprocal influences, O’Grady sheds light on the ways Blackness has always existed at the heart of Western modernism. O’Grady’s radical revisionism of the 1980s and 1990s anticipated themes that have been embraced by a younger generation of artists and thinkers, inspiring them to resist and reshape a world structured by difference and inequity.

The exhibition features twelve of the major projects O’Grady has produced over her four-decade career and also debuts a much-anticipated new installation. The organization of the exhibition could be adapted by venues to present certain projects in conversation with works from other collections, if available, as the Brooklyn Museum has done, to showcase the artist’s long engagement with art historical omissions and institutional failings related to the creative agency of those excluded from the canon.

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 Jenée-Daria Strand, Curatorial Assistant, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.

Tour Schedule with Dates

Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina

January 8–April 30, 2022

Brooklyn Museum, New York

March 5–July 18, 2021