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 more than 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, Curatorial Assistant, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.