• Events
• Press Release
• Symposium: Teaching/Learning with Lorraine O'Grady's Both/And
• Taking the White Gloves Off: A Performance Art Series in Honor of Lorraine O'Grady ‘55
• Publication: Teaching/Learning with Lorraine O'Grady's Both/And

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is the first major career survey of the renowned conceptual artist and cultural critic whose work has challenged prevailing understandings around gender, race, and class for over four decades. The exhibition charts the development of O’Grady’s artistic oeuvre, which spans collage, photo-installation, performance, video, and text. 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; colonialism and slavery; hybridity and diasporic experience; multiplicity and selfhood; and intersectional feminist theory and praxis. For O’Grady, the diptych form, by forcing sustained conversation, can hold tellingly chosen dissimilars still long enough to become familiar. In deploying the diptych as both artistic and conceptual strategy, O’Grady has achieved a transformational anti-hierarchical approach to difference. Over the course of her practice, she has refused the possibility of neat resolution and remained committed to keeping contradictions in play so as to undermine the power dynamics baked into the binary oppositions of self and other, male and female, West and non-West, Black and White, 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, Former Curatorial Associate, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. 

Leadership support for this exhibition is provided by 

Organized for the Davis Museum by Amanda Gilvin, Sonja Novak Koerner '51 Senior Curator of Collections and Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs, the exhibition is presented at the Davis with generous support from the Mildred Cooper Glimcher '61 Endowed Fund, the Anonymous '70 Endowed Museum Program Fund, Wellesley College Friends of Art at the Davis, and the Alice G. Spink Art Fund.

Lorraine O’Grady would like to thank the following: Chappelle Freeman Jr., Edward Bowden Allen, Ellen Rosen, Richard DeGussi-Bogutski, Coreen Simpson, Salimah Ali, Eileen Harris Norton, Just Above Midtown (JAM), Linda Goode Bryant, Anne Fucci Criscitiello, Freda Leinwand, Gylbert Coker, Horace Brockington, Jennifer Manfredi, Ellen Sragow, Emily Velde, Bern 1905, Noah Jemisin, Lorenzo Pace, Beverly Trachtenberg, Bill O’Connor, Francine Berman, Steven Overman (Eastman Kodak Company), Marlon Ziello (Ziello Inc.), Corinne Jennings, Joe Overstreet, George Mingo, Keith Haring, New York State Council on the Arts, Whitfield Lovell, Robert Ransick, Lilith Dove, Nahna Kim, Shamus Clisset (Laumont Photographics ), Willie Vera (Laumont Photographics), the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons, David Cabrera and Alexander Gray, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Theo Davis, Courtney R. Baker, Irene Cheng, Adrienne Caldwell, Anonymous Was A Woman, Winslow Hinds, Carlo Montagnino, Tavis Delahunt (NB Technologies), Habby Osk, Carmen von Kende, Carolyn Tennant, Andil Gosine, Sur Rodney (Sur), Kyla McMillan, Ursula Davila-Villa, Brian Guerin, Kelly Spivey and Bill Seery (Mercer Media), Maria Elena Venuto (The Standby Program), Jason Crump (Metropolis Post), Art Matters, United States Artists, René Schmitt’s Druckgraphik, Stephanie Sparling Williams, Stacy A. Scibelli, Laura Lappi, Creative Capital, Jeff Wasson (Wasson Artistry), Matt White, John Umphlett, Miles Templeton, Scott Wilson (Darkwood Armory), Peter Johnsson (Albion Swords Ltd., LLC ), Mike Sigman (Albion Swords Ltd., LLC), Kerry Gaertner Gerbracht, Loretta Polk, Aruna D’Souza, Anne Pasternak (Brooklyn Museum), Catherine J. Morris (Brooklyn Museum), Audrey Walen (Brooklyn Museum), Page Benkowski (Alexander Gray Associates), Ken Wissoker (Duke University Press), Michael McCullough (Duke University Press), Laura Sell (Duke University Press), Karen Kelly (Dancing Foxes Press ), Barbara Schroeder (Dancing Foxes Press), Alice Chung (Omnivore, Inc.), Jacqueline Francis (Wattis Institute), Jeanne Gerrity (Wattis Institute), Kim Nguyen (Wattis Institute), Zoe Leonard, Adam Pendleton, Adrienne Edwards, Rujeko Hockley, Anne Byrd, Connie Butler, Legacy Russell, Thomas Lax, Deana Haggag, Christine Kuan, James Schamus, Rachida Bumbray, Simone Leigh, Tina Campt, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Loophole of Retreat: Venice, Sandra Payne, Patricia Spears Jones, Anna Stothart, Miranda Samuels, Josie Roland Hodson, Nick Mauss, Jarrett Earnest, Holland Cotter, Siddhartha Mitter, David Velasco, Catherine Damman, Mira Dayal, Doreen St. Félix, Zawe Ashton, Diane Henry Lepart, Rianna Jade Parker, Sam Vernon, Moko Fukuyama, Haoyan of America, Richard Nathaniel (DJ Vinyl Richie), Paul and Carole Thompson, Emma McKee, Mariane Ibrahim, Tina Bridgeport, Norman Polk, Ellen Martin Story, Candace  Allen, Kimberly Allen-King, Guy D. and Annette Olbert Jones, Ciara Casey Mendes, Kristin Emily Jones, Devon April Jones, Kevin Elijah Mendes, Royce Marco Mendes, Marlia Snow Elgeziry, Rixi Coral Elgeziry, Limon, Furby, and Rocinante.