Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And - SOLD OUT!

Join MA-NMWA for a curator-led tour of Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And, the first retrospective of an artist who has been a critical voice in performance, conceptual, and feminist art for more than four decades. Lorraine O’Grady became an artist at age forty-five, after successful careers in the U.S. Departments of State and Labor, professional translating, rock criticism, and teaching French literature and art. She jokes that because she came to her artistic career late in life, she “only had time for masterpieces.”

O’Grady’s work revolves around a consistent set of themes: Black female subjectivity and Black feminism; hybridity and diaspora; the unspoken aftermath of slavery in the Western Hemisphere; the contradictions and complications of her upbringing in Boston as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants; and the impossibility of separating the personal from the political, or the self from history. The artist’s practice is driven by a desire to replace Western “either/or” thinking—which O’Grady sees as the basis of the inequalities that structure our world—with the concept of “both/and.” 

Amanda Gilvin, the Sonja Novak Koerner '51 Senior Curator of Collections and Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, will lead the tour.