Lorraine O'Grady: Both/And

Lorraine O’Grady (c/o ‘55) a critically acclaimed contemporary artist and cultural critic, returns to the Boston area with her retrospective exhibition Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And, on view from February 8, 2024 - June 2, 2024. This landmark exhibition will coincide with a performance art series, both of which are free and open to the public. Both/And will be on view at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College from February 8 to June 2, 2024. 

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is the first major career survey of the renowned conceptual artist whose work has long challenged prevailing understandings around gender, race, and class. Originally organized by the Brooklyn Museum in March 2021, the exhibition charts the development of O’Grady’s artistic oeuvre, which spans collage, photo-installation, performance, and video. 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; hybridity and diasporic experience; multiplicity and selfhood; colonialism and slavery; and intersectional feminist theory and praxis. Through her deployment of the diptych as both an artistic and conceptual strategy, O’Grady calls for an anti-hierarchical approach to difference within the categories of Black and white, self and other, West and non-West, and past and present. Through spring, the Davis Museum will offer an opportunity for visitors to experience O’Grady’s work and to participate in free public programs, including a symposium and “Taking the White Gloves Off: A Performance Art Series in Honor of Lorraine O’Grady ‘55.”