Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And

Title: Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And

Authors: Aruna D'Souza, Catherine Morris, Catherine Lord, Ann Pasternak, Lorraine O'Grady, Harry Burke, Malik Gaines, Zoe Whitley, Stephanie Sparling Williams

Publisher: Dancing Foxes Press

Publication Year: 2021

ISBN: 978-0872731868

Conceptual performance artist Lorraine O'Grady burst into the contemporary art world in 1980 dressed in a gown made of 180 pairs of white gloves and wielding a chrysanthemum-studded whip. For the next three years, O’Grady documented her exploits as this incendiary fictional persona, visiting gallery openings and providing critiques of the racial politics at play in the New York art scene. The resulting series, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, was merely the beginning of a long career of avant-garde work that would continue to build upon O’Grady’s conceptions of self and subjectivity as seen from the perspective of a Black woman artist. This survey of O’Grady’s work spans four decades of her career and features nearly all of her major projects, as well as Announcement, the opening series of a new performance piece seven years in the making. Contextualized by an extensive timeline with letters, journal entries and interviews, Both/And provides a long-overdue close examination of O’Grady’s artistic and intellectual ambitions.