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9/9/2008

Lorraine O'Grady

Alexander Gray Associates, New York

Lorraine O’Grady’s iconic series, Miscegenated Family Album is her 1994 photo-installation of cibachrome diptychs. Originating from her 1980 performance work, Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, this 16-part photographic series juxtaposes appropriated images from O’Grady’s family history with images of iconic Ancient Egyptian sculptures. The image pairs draw uncanny aesthetic parallels, while weaving together narratives that connect personal stories with historical events.

The installation has appeared in exhibitions at numerous venues, including The Art Institute of Chicago; the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and the Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Denmark. The exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates is the first time the entire series is shown in New York.

Lorraine O’Grady's work as an artist, writer, and critic presents hybridized notions of aesthetics and identity to rediagram the politics of diaspora. Since the early 1980s, O'Grady has challenged racial and sexist ideologies in performance and photo installations that combine both opposition to philosophies of division and exclusion, and humanist studies of women throughout history.

Born in Boston, MA in 1934 to West Indian parents, O’Grady made her works in 1980. Studying economics and literature, she had several careers: an intelligence analyst for the United States government, a literary commercial translator, and rock critic. Her broad background contributed to a distanced and critical view of the art world, and to an eclectic attitude toward artmaking. Although her work has intellectual content that is rigorous and political, the work is generally marked by unapologetic beauty and elegance. O’Grady’s work comments on visual resemblance made evident by the continuity of a shared cultural heritage across thousands of generations, connecting the histories of countless peoples.

Throughout the 1980s, O’Grady was active within the alternative New York art world, lending a voice to the new wave of feminism that took into account perspectives that were underrepresented during the feminist movements of the 1970s. Concerned with the lack of African-American representation in the Women’s Action Coalition, she critiqued its continuation of the early feminist movement’s inability to “make itself meaningful to working-class white women and to non-white women of all classes.” O’Grady has maintained an ongoing commitment to articulating “hybrid” subjective positions that span a range of races, classes, and social identities. In addition to her work as a visual artist, O’Grady has also made innovative contributions to cultural criticism with her writings, including the now canonical article, Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity.

Reception for the Artist: Wednesday, September 10

Alexander Gray Associates
526 West 26 Street - New York
Free admission

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