Lorraine O’Grady, "Art Is... (Girlfriends Times Two)," 1983. Chromogenic photograph in 40 parts, 20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.64 cm). © Lorraine O'Grady/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, and Mexico City).
Homecomings are rarely quite so literal as the one taking place at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum, where “Both/And,” Lorraine O’Grady’s heady 50-year career survey opened this month. O’Grady, a pivotal figure in the Black vanguard of New York’s art scene in the 1980s, graduated from Wellesley in 1955; there’s a better than decent chance she walked to and from class on the leafy pathways just outside the museum’s door.
You’d be right to note a contrast. An elite all-girls college in 1950s New England might not seem like a typical incubator for the Black avant-garde, but everything about O’Grady elides binary assumption. “Both/And” isn’t so much a title as a way of being; O’Grady resists extremes, and her art lives in the comingling of complex opposites, a constant to-and-fro that makes her work more relevant than ever. In her humanely open-minded challenge to silo thinking, O’Grady, now 89, has always had something critical to say about the perils of retreating to one’s corner; in a fractious election year, there’s an eerie resonance.
Excerpted words written by Murray Whyte in The Boston Globe.
