Teaching/Learning with Lorraine O'Grady's Both/And : simplebooklet.com

Co-edited by Lorraine O’Grady and Amanda Gilvin, Teaching/Learning with Lorraine O’Grady’s Both/And is published in conjunction with with the presentation of the exhibition Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College February 8 – June 2, 2024This online publication supports interdisciplinary teaching and learning by reprinting several of O’Grady’s own signiﬁcant essays and critical analyses of her work. This e-book features new reﬂections on O’Grady’s artworks by members of the Wellesley community from diverse departments, disciplines, and perspectives. © 2023 Davis Museum at Wellesley CollegeAmanda GilvinLorraine O’Gradyand the authorsAll artwork by Lorraine O’Grady© Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, and Mexico City)Designed by Alicia Bruce, Friends of Art Curatorial Project Manager and Researcher at the Davis MuseumAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted or reproduced in any form or by an electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information retrieval systems, without prior written permission from the copyright holders.ISBN 979-8-9854904-1-1Davis MuseumWellesley College106 Central StreetWellesley, Massachusetts 02481www.davismuseum.wellesley.edu

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ContentsForeword | Paula A. Johnson President, Wellesley College Introduction | Amanda Gilvin Sonja Novak Koerner ‘51 Senior Curator of Collections and Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs, Davis Museum, Wellesley CollegeSection 1: The Artist’s Perspective Career Narrative | Lorraine O’Grady Biographical text updated on August 28, 2023Some Thoughts on Diaspora and Hybridity: An Unpublished Slide Lecture | Lorraine O’Grady Lecture delivered at a Wellesley College faculty symposium (1994)My 1980s | Lorraine O’Grady Lecture delivered at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in conjunction with the exhibition This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s and published in Art Journal (2012) Rivers and Just Above Midtown | Lorraine O’Grady Introduction read at 2013 symposium for Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 at MoMA PS1. Text ﬁrst published in 2015 exhibition catalogue for Alexander Gray Associates (2013, 2015)Meeting Lorraine O’Grady | Zawe Ashton Video produced in conjunction with the exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in The Age of Black Power at Tate Modern (2017)On Creating a Counter-Confessional Poetry | Lorraine O’Grady Edited responses from an interview with Lauren O’Neill-Butler ﬁrst published in ArtForum (2018)From Me to Them to Me Again: Text in Three Parts to Accompany a Diptych Portfolio | Lorraine O’Grady Text published in the edited volume Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (2020) 8931394759666771

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76879598103106107110Diptych Portfolio | Lorraine O’Grady Art portfolio produced for the edited volume Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (2020) Section 2: A Prole from the Loophole of Retreat: VeniceLorraine O’Grady, Through the Loophole and Back (2023) | Rianna Jade Parker Proﬁle in Seen (Winter 2023)Section 3: Teaching/Learning at WellesleyTeaching with the Lorraine O’Grady Collection at the Wellesley College Archives | Sara Ludovissy College Archivist, Wellesley College Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Protest | Erin Battat Lecturer in the Writing Program, Wellesley CollegeCutting Out The New York Times, 1977Cutting Out CONYT, 1977/2017Ready When You Are | Deana Weatherly ‘22 Learning Programs Coordinator, Fuller Craft MuseumFact and Fantasy | Patricia Birch Assistant Dean for Intercultural Education, Director of Harambee House, and Advisor for Students of African Descent, Wellesley College I am Here. We Are Here. | Kelsey Miller Visiting Lecturer in Art, Wellesley College Miscegenated Family Album, 1980/94The Object of History and the History of Objects (1994) | Carol Dougherty Professor of Classical Studies, Wellesley College Published in a handout for the exhibition Body as Measure, presented at the Davis Museum in 1994 and included a selection of diptychs from Miscegenated Family Album

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113117119122124128130132Collapsing Time, Reframing Debates | Elizabeth Minor ‘03 Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology, Wellesley College “People Who Looked Like Me”: Finding the Lens of Both/And | Joye Bowman ‘74 and Imani Hiinson ‘14 Professor of History and Senior Associate Dean, University of Massachusetts Amherst Senior Project Manager, General Services Administration, United StatesMlle Bourgeoise Noire, 1980-83Our Voices Are Heard | Alvia Wardlaw ‘69 Professor and Director of the University Museum, Texas Southern UniversityThe Black and White Show, 1983Curating as Conceptual Art | Iris Simone Haastrup-Sanders ‘22 Gallery Assistant, Jack Shainman GalleryArt Is . . . , 1983Teaching What “Art Is” at Wellesley College with Lorraine O’Grady ‘55 | Nikki A. Greene Associate Professor of Art, Wellesley CollegeMake Me Art! | Regina Gallardo ‘23 Community and Family Engagement Coordinator, Boston Children’s Museum Behind and Beyond the Frame | Chuxin Zhang ‘24 Art History and Philosophy Major and 2022 Davis Museum Summer Intern, Wellesley CollegeBody Is the Ground of My Experience, 1991My Body, My Ground, and My Experience at Wellesley | Rhonda Gray ‘95 Professor of English, Roxbury Community College and Instructor in Physical Education, Recreation and Athletics, Wellesley College

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8Lorraine O’Grady ’55 is clearly one of the most important artists ever to graduate from Wellesley College. I am so happy that the Davis Museum is hosting an exhibition of her work titled Both/And, because it is giving our students and our entire community the opportunity to get to know her. Her art embodies an idea at the very heart of a Wellesley education: inclusive excellence. It has broken new ground in insisting that our society needs to become more expansive, and the art world must embrace Black artists and Black subjects. Her work is full of humanity, humor, beauty, and joy. Because Lorraine O’Grady has generously donated her personal and professional papers to Wellesley College, our students, faculty, and scholars from across the globe will have the opportunity to learn from her remarkable art and life for generations to come. Before she became an artist, she had a string of other fascinating careers, including as a research economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an entrepreneur, and a music reviewer. Lorraine O’Grady herself is “both/and.” What a wonderful example for our students of creativity, fearlessness, and the power of a Wellesley education! Foreword Paula Johnson President, Wellesley College

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9The renowned conceptual artist and cultural critic Lorraine O’Grady has made transformational contributions to the ﬁelds of contemporary art, art history, literature, feminist studies, African Diaspora studies, and more. Working across the media of performance, writing, photo-graphy, collage, and video, she has produced several bodies of work now widely acknowledged as canonical in the art history of twentieth- and twenty-ﬁrst-century art. Having begun her career as a visual and conceptual artist in her mid-forties, she continues to produce dynamic, surprising work as she approaches her ninetieth birthday. By focusing on the diptych and her associated theorization of Both/And—in which one can hold seemingly oppositional concepts in inﬁnite conversation— her artistic practice models the projects of reciprocity and redress that she has also demonstrated as a thinker, educator, and Wellesley alumna.Throughout each stage of her career, O’Grady has built on her Wellesley experience: she has carried Wellesley with her throughout the world. Reciprocally, she has also, very generously, given back. The presentation of Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And at the Davis represents a homecoming for O’Grady, to the Wellesley campus and to Boston—to roots that have informed and been transformed through this artist’s oeuvre.O’Grady has shown great generosity to her alma mater for decades. Her gift to the Wellesley College Archives in 2010 marked the ﬁrst major gift of alumnae papers to the College. She has connected with Wellesley students and fellow alumnae time and again, on and off Introduction Amanda Gilvin Sonja Novak Koerner ‘51 Senior Curator of Collections and Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs, Davis Museum at Wellesley College

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10campus, as professor Nikki A. Greene recounts in her essay in this volume. She has approached the exhibition of Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And at the Davis Museum with this same commitment to sharing learning experiences with current Wellesley students. The College celebrated her singular artistic contributions in 2017 with an Alumnae Achievement award, and now, hosting this landmark retrospective exhibition provides a remarkable opportunity for the entire campus to share in the sustained attention that O’Grady’s powerful artistic and intellectual contributions deserve. Her theorization of Both/And challenges fundamental modernist assumptions that structure disci-plines like art history, literature, and philosophy—and inﬂuence people’s daily lives and their most intimate relationships. The expan-siveness of her oeuvre, through its explorations of Black women’s subjectivity, diaspora and hybridity, and history-making, makes it ideal for the rigorous, object-based learning across the disciplines that we cultivate at the Davis and at Wellesley.The arc of her career, and particularly the extraordinary interdisciplinary breadth of her artistic practice, exempliﬁes the College’s commitment to inclusive excellence at its best and truest. O’Grady’s incorporation of herself and her family into her artwork also resonates with the Davis’s “Wellesley Method for Today,” an object-based, human-centered pedagogy that emphasizes ethics as equal in importance to scholarly rigor—a Both/And approach that is indebted to O’Grady’s scholarly contributions. 1. See Nikki A. Greene, “Teaching What ‘Art Is’ at Wellesley College with Lorraine O’Grady ‘55,” pages 124-126.2. Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And originated at the Brooklyn Museum (March 5-July 18, 2021), and also traveled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro (January 8-April 30, 2022). The exhibition was organized by Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, and writer Aruna D’Souza with Jenee-Daria Strand, Former Curatorial Associate, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. The catalogue is an essential reference for the study of Lorraine O’Grady. Catherine Morris and Aruna D’Souza, eds., Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum and Dancing Foxes Press, 2021).

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12Lorraine O’Grady ‘55 at WellesleyAt Wellesley, an institution with a proud legacy of educating important thinkers with global impact since 1875, the exhibition of Both/And at the Davis has occasioned reﬂection on O’Grady’s experiences as a student, and the inﬂuence of her Wellesley education on her art and life. During preparations for the exhibition, members of the Davis Museum Student Advisory Council and students studying O’Grady in their classes have been asking questions like: What were her favorite places on campus? What kinds of papers did she write? What was it like to be one of the few Black students at Wellesley in the early 1950s? Recognizing O’Grady’s proliﬁc and powerful written work, Both/And exhibition curators Catherine Morris and Aruna D’Souza had already plumbed O’Grady’s papers at Wellesley. The traveling version of the exhibition they organized for the Brooklyn Museum in 2021 features fourteen large vitrines full of her writings—collaged, handwritten, and typed. For the Davis presentation, I have added a case to display papers and objects speciﬁcally related to her Wellesley education. We see her photo as a high school senior in the 1951 portrait directory made for the entering Class of 1955. Her yellow beanie still cheerfully announces “55,” as it did when she wore it to celebratory events with her class-mates. We see the A- on the Spanish paper that she submitted on October 19, 1955, following her return from a leave of absence as a young, married mother, Lorraine O’Grady Jones. The November 29, 1956 edition of the Wellesley College News trumpets her appointment as a Management Intern, the civil service’s then most elite and competitive entry-level position, in the prestigious Bureau of Labor Statistics at the United States Department of Labor in Washington, D.C.Two objects from O’Grady’s Wellesley years have echoed in my mind since I ﬁrst saw them. Both relate to an event in O’Grady’s second semester at Wellesley: Tree Day, May 10, 1952, on Severance Green. Leaﬁng through ﬁles and books in the Wellesley Archives, I recognized O’Grady in a photograph in the Class of 1955 Legenda, Wellesley’s

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13senior yearbook. It sparked my imagination, and I saw connections between that Spring day in 1952 and the artistic career that O’Grady would launch about thirty years later. Among several traditions that harken back to the College’s earliest years, Tree Day—now called Tree Planting Day—hosts an annual ceremony in which every sophomore class plants a tree. In 1952, all four classes joined the pageantry, which included a “Ceremony of the Spade” and an excerpted interpretation of Igor Stravinsky’s famous ballet, The Firebird Suite. In the photograph of seven young women, O’Grady and the others smile widely, mid-dance or mid-pose. Crouched over one dancer while another leans over her to the right side of the frame, O’Grady looks just beyond the camera’s lens. Do she and the others looking to their left see another camera? A crowd? Or is she just trying to keep her balance?A star student who had a lot of fun, O’Grady also faced serious chal-lenges during her time at Wellesley. She entered as a History major under family pressure to become a lawyer. She switched to a Spanish Literature major, and even became president of l’Atalaya, the Spanish Corridor in her residence hall, during her sophomore year. Then, she became pregnant at a time when women had few options for control-ling their fertility and found little educational and career support for mothers. While several faculty provided the crucial support that would allow her to ﬁnish her degree, she also faced indignities like the requirement that married students eat lunch separately from the un-married students living on campus. After having her son, she changed her major to Economics in hopes of improving her job prospects.Knowing some of what lay ahead for this Wellesley ﬁrst-year dancing on Severance Green—and thinking about our current students in early3. Every Wellesley class, including the ﬁrst one, Class of 1879, has planted a tree. Wellesley College, “Traditions,” https://www.wellesley.edu/campuslife/community/traditions [Accessed January 3, 2024].

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14adulthood—I consider how performance requires presence, a particular experience of the passage of time. Although in some ways wildly different from the conceptual art for which she is now known, O’Grady’s Tree Day dance nonetheless anticipates the artistic genre, performance, for which she is so highly regarded and that is at the foundation of her work in other media. Her entire artistic practice is both performance and the collages, videos, and photographs that we see in the Davis’s Camilla Chandler and Dorothy Buffum Chandler Gallery and the Marjorie and Gerald Bronfman Gallery this semester. This began with what she describes as “smooshing” the newspaper cuttings for those ﬁrst Cutting Out The New York Times poems and continues with her poses in knight’s armor for Announcement of a New Persona (Performances to Come!). During that playful performance at the 1952 Tree Day, O’Grady and other students used their bodies to make a community in relationship to the College’s distinctive landscape—a community intended to maintain an emotional, intellectual, and tangible link between the students and Wellesley long after they became alumnae. The trees of Tree Day continue to grow around campus, nurtured by Wellesley’s expert arborists, and this performance remains enshrined in the photo- graphs in the Legenda. O’Grady’s Tree Day program will sit for many more years in the Wellesley College Archives—and this semester, we have the opportunity to see it in a vitrine at the Davis.O’Grady’s invented worlds contain echoes of the ceremonies that sustain a continuity in student experience from 1875 until today. Even the reiterative quality of her process—as she returns again and again to the poetry of Cutting Out The New York Times, for example—functions to reconvene dialogues that are not intended to end, but to be per-formed and expanded on a regular basis. Yet, today, we can also look at 4. O’Grady describes the process of making Cutting Out The New York Times in “My 1980s,” on pages 47-58 of this volume. She will show new work from Announcement of a New Persona (Performances to Come!) in her upcoming exhibition at the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery in Chicago, The Knight or Lancela Palm-and-Steel.

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15the joyful smile on a young woman’s face, and know how thoroughly and publicly she would reject the bourgeois training and expectations that were inculcated at Tree Day—and throughout daily life at Wellesley in the 1950s. The ways that she returns to, reforms, and revises art-works over decades demonstrates how she herself—and the culture at large—have changed, including through the impact of her work.She arrived at Wellesley an accomplished student, and continued to excel. She has described Wellesley (and her ﬁrst jobs in government) as “a seeming meritocracy.” As a student, she honed the language and writing skills that would ground each phase of her career. A position heading the Spanish-speaking hall prepared her for future leadership roles as a business owner, organizer, and educator. Wellesley’s prestige buoyed her career opportunities, but she also achieved post-graduate accomplishments beyond the College’s expectations for its students when she entered the federal Management Intern Program. Wellesley made an indelible imprint on the biography of this remarkable artist, writer, and cultural critic.O’Grady has written and spoken about her relationship to Wellesley, and she incorporated direct references to the College into her most famous performance persona, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire. Yet, O’Grady also became an artist in direct resistance to much of what she had learned at Wellesley. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s white gloves allude to those O’Grady had herself worn as a senior interviewing for jobs. The writing on her sash, “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 1955,” marked the year of O’Grady’s—Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s—Wellesley class graduation. Performing as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire on the Art Is . . . parade ﬂoat for the African-American Day Parade in Harlem in 1983, O’Grady pinned 5. See Lorraine O’Grady, “My 1980s” on pages 47-58 in this volume and in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973-2019, ed. Aruna D’Souza (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020): 207.6. Lorraine O’Grady on Wellesley’s Effect on Mlle Bourgeoise Noire—Friends of Art, 2011. https://vimeo.com/149182076 [Accessed on January 3, 2024].

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16her own vintage gloves to her t-shirt as a way to confront her own bourgeoise-ness. At a Wellesley alumnae panel organized by Wellesley Friends of Art in New York in 2011, she explained of her time at Girls’ Latin School and at Wellesley: It was a rigorous education that I will never ever regret having. However, to be very honest, the process of becoming an artist was in some ways a dismantling of that education. Dismantling the categories, and the ways of organizing perception, under- standing, and information. In order to become an artist, I had to strip away everything that Latin School and Wellesley had taught me. But it is not to say that I am not totally indebted to everything that I learned.O’Grady (along with other critical writers, including Morris, D’Souza, and Stephanie Sparling Williams), has analyzed Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s central institutional critique of the art world. Here, I want to emphasize the challenges her alter ego poses to higher education, and to Wellesley in particular. O’Grady has contrasted the “bombed-out factory” environment of the School of Visual Arts, where she was an adjunct instructor from 1974 until 2000, with Wellesley’s park-like campus—to praise the intellectual and artistic energy of the students, faculty, and campus at SVA. In developing Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, she took inspiration from Léon Damas (1912-1978), a French poet from Cayenne, French Guiana, whose work explored both violent external and internalized anti-Black racism—and exempliﬁed the type of colonial critique that was unlikely to have been taught at Wellesley 7. See O’Grady, “My 1980s” in this volume and in O’Grady 2020.8. Lorraine O’Grady on Wellesley’s Effect on Mlle Bourgeoise Noire—Friends of Art, 2011. https://vimeo.com/149182076 [Accessed on January 3, 2024] 9. O’Grady, “Interview with Linda Montano (1986),” Writing in Space, 1973-2019, ed. Aruna D’Souza (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020): 79.

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17in the 1950s. O’Grady has described all those white leather gloves— including her own—as symbols of internalized oppression. She gained knowledge and opportunity at Wellesley, and she was also taught to ignore the many realities of race and class that would later become her chief topics of inquiry and enactment.Both/And at WellesleyO’Grady proposed this publication when we ﬁrst met in March 2023 as a way to support teaching with the exhibition at Wellesley. We spent months referring to it as a “course packet,” because we both hope that faculty at Wellesley and other schools will use it for teaching in class-rooms and museum galleries. She designed the ﬁrst two sections. The ﬁrst, “The Artist’s Perspective,” republishes several of her most important essays, and includes a beautiful documentary portrait of her directed by the actor Zawe Ashton. In the second section, “A Proﬁle from the Loophole of Retreat: Venice,” Rianna Jade Parker analyzes the signiﬁcance of O’Grady’s work for the landmark event. The third section, “Teaching/Learning at Wellesley,” which I edited, too reﬂects her vision for a course packet to include responses to her artwork from Wellesley students, staff, faculty, and alumnae. She expressed a char-acteristic eagerness to learn from the writings, symposium speakers, and class visits during the run of Both/And at the Davis. In Section 1, “The Artist’s Perspective,” readers have the opportunity to learn directly from O’Grady about some of the historical and theoret- ical grounding that will help them teach and learn through her work. She updated her professional biography, or “Career Narrative,” in August of 2023. It provides a concise synopsis of O’Grady’s achieve-ments as an artist and writer, with an emphasis on her conceptual and 10. O’Grady, “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 1955 (1981),” Writing in Space, 1973-2019, ed. Aruna D’Souza (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020): 8-10. See also Catherine Damman, “Risk Everything,” ArtForum, March 2021. https://www.artforum.com/features/catherine-damman-on-the-art-of-lorraine-ogrady-249359/ [Accessed January 3, 2024].

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18theoretical interventions. “Some Thoughts on Diaspora and Hybridity: An Unpublished Slide Lecture” was ﬁnally published in O’Grady’s collected writings edited by D’Souza, but it is ﬁtting for the Davis to re-publish it in 2024, because it was originally delivered as part of Davis Museum programming. O’Grady was invited back to Wellesley by Davis curator Judith Hoos Fox for the exhibition Body As Measure, to participate in a panel discussing what was then her new work, Miscegenated Family Album. She was especially excited to speak with Black students, who she hoped were also engaging with the subjects of diaspora and hybridity in their studies. She was disappointed to ﬁnd a largely white audience. Faculty told her that students of color were under pressure from parents to prepare for lucrative careers—as she had once changed her major to Economics. Yet, this seems to me to let Wellesley, the Davis, and the Art Department off too easily. I suspect more could have been done to ensure that students of color felt more welcome at the then new Davis Museum—and I am conﬁdent that there were more students of diverse backgrounds interested in the subjects discussed that day. In her lecture, O’Grady weaves personal biography, postcolonial theory, and ancient Egyptian history to explicate how Miscegenated Family Album is both a personal exploration of grief and an assertive upending of the portrayal of hermetically sealed, racially separate cultures. Furthermore, she points to African cultures’ foundational contributions to ancient Egypt, the nineteenth-century Caribbean, and twentieth-century North America.“My 1980s” was also ﬁrst delivered as a lecture. O’Grady gave the talk in conjunction with Helen Molesworth’s exhibition This Will Have Been at MoCA Chicago. The 1980s were the years that O’Grady began her career as an artist—and the years that she apprehended how the11. See O’Grady, “Some Thoughts on Diaspora and Hybridity: An Unpublished Slide Lecture” on pages 39-46 in this volume and in Writing in Space, 1973-2019, ed. Aruna D’Souza (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020): 119-125.12. O’Grady, “Interview with Laura Cottingham (1995),” Writing in Space, 1973-2019, ed. Aruna D’Souza (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020): 220.

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19racism of the art world reﬂects the broader injustices that her artwork could challenge. In her presentation, she portrays a decade of old-fashioned modernism—and its attendant power structures—refusing to depart the stage. She contextualizes her works like Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s guerilla performances and Art Is . . . within the decade. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s symbols were rich with historical signiﬁcance, and they spoke directly to the bourgeois, modernist, racist, and sexist strictures of the years when the performances took place. “Rivers and Just Above Midtown” is divided into two parts, one that was delivered as a talk and another ﬁrst published in conjunction with an exhibition of the photographs of Rivers, First Draft, or the Woman in Red, in 2015. The “Intro” gives an account of the performance in the grand landscape of Central Park’s The Loch (designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux), in which O’Grady told a story about coming into her own as an artist and person. Her sustained interest in the work of both Frederick Law Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. was doubtlessly shaped by her years at Wellesley, with its park-like campus designed by Olmsted Jr. “Text” is a gorgeous portrait of the community of Black artists that convened around the gallery Just Above Midtown (1974-1986). She situates Rivers, First Draft within that world, which was also all too ephemeral. In Meeting Lorraine O’Grady, O’Grady and Ashton cover a lot of theoretical, historical, and actual ground as they take taxis around Manhattan and walk through Central Park to visit The Loch thirty-ﬁve years after O’Grady staged Rivers, First Draft, or the Woman in Red. As they discuss the racist and sexist discrimination that Black women face, O’Grady describes “art as a way of saying you’re not alone.”13. For more on the history of Just Above Midtown, see the recent volume Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces (The Museum of Modern Art: The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 2022). It accompanied an exhibition at MoMA of the same name that was on view from October 9, 2022 until February 18, 2023. 14. In addition to on page 66 of this volume, you can ﬁnd Meeting Lorraine on the Tate Modern’s YouTube channel. https://youtu.be/60U8FXYS69A?feature=shared [Accessed January 3, 2024].

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20Their warm rapport is just one instance of O’Grady’s powerful inﬂuence; she has mentored, taught, and inspired younger Black women in many careers and artists from diverse backgrounds. O’Grady tells Ashton that you need a mirror to see yourself. In her edited responses to an interview with Lauren O’Neill-Butler, O’Grady distills the conceptual signiﬁcance of the Both/And framework and the diptych for her work. She explains Cutting Out the New York Times as having emerged from her years of studying and teaching Surrealism, and notes however that those collages in 1977 had not “confess[ed] from the outside in,” as she hoped that they would. She returned to them once again. The 2017 series of prints, Cutting Out CONYT, on the other hand, accomplishes her goals of making visible what she has elsewhere described as a “sous-realité,” an under-reality. “From Me to Them to Me Again: Text in Three Parts to Accompany a Diptych Portfolio” appeared in Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value, a volume edited by C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp in 2020. In this text accompanied by an art portfolio, O’Grady reﬂects on decades of explaining her use of the diptych to demonstrate how a Both/And approach refuses the hierarchies of race, gender, and class that distort human experiences of reality. In September 1998, a visitor to her studio suested that the triptych form might better suit her goals. This essay’s “exhibit A” consists of notes from that conversation, in which she describes the oppositional hierarchies inherent in Western thought, and how the juxtapositions in her diptychs undermine them. Twenty years later, in 2018, she gathered notes for “exhibit B,” in which she argues that her purpose extends far beyond the art world world to call for cultural transformation: broadly practiced Both/And thinking that accounts for and honors Black diasporic experiences. Along with the texts, she arranged diptychs of images from four of her15. C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp, eds. Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020).

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21series. The ﬁnal images, from Cutting Out CONYT, proclaim that The modern artist, ﬁnding himself with no shared foundation, has begun to build on Reckless Storytelling STAR WORDS And The Deluxe Almost-Everything-Included WORK OF ARTThe Deluxe Almost-Everything-Included WORK OF ART. What better description for any Both/And diptych by O’Grady?Section 2, “A Proﬁle from the Loophole of Retreat: Venice,” consists of a biographical proﬁle written by the writer, critic, curator, and researcher Rianna Jade Parker. In many ways, it was in Venice in 2022 that O’Grady found the audience of Black women to whom she had been most directly speaking for decades—including those Wellesley students she had hoped to meet in 1994. Parker poetically depicts not only O’Grady, but a multigenerational “continuum” of Black Jamaican women who have outsized impact on cultures on multiple continents.In Section 3, “Teaching/Learning at Wellesley,” nineteen Wellesley students, staff, faculty, and alumnae offer reﬂections on how they teach with and learn from O’Grady’s art. I offered an introductory workshop for faculty and staff on June 7, 2023 and then circulated a call for contributions. The range of subjects, formats, and perspectives chimes16. See also Greene, “Teaching What ‘Art Is’ at Wellesley College with Lorraine O’Grady ‘55,” pages 124-126.

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22elegantly with O’Grady’s own conceptual breadth, and the expansive potential her work offers for teaching across the disciplines. College Archivist Sara Ludovissy stewards O’Grady’s papers, work that includes guest teaching classes from across the College. Morris and D’Souza’s incorporation of O’Grady’s archives into the exhibition Both/And allows all of us to beneﬁt from the College Archives’ impor-tant work to catalog, preserve, and educate. In the semester before Both/And opened at the Davis, Lecturer in the Writing Program Erin Battat built a research paper assignment around O’Grady’s work for her ﬁrst-year writing seminar, Writing for Protest. The class contextualized O’Grady’s writing and art-making within Black feminist protest movements of the late twentieth century. As one of the ﬁrst papers that the students were asked to write at Wellesley, Battat’s assignment offered important learning goals in critical analysis, research skills, and, of course, writing.Other Wellesley authors each focus on a single artwork or body of work. I have arranged them in chronological order according to when the artworks were begun. In a close reading of two of the ﬁrst Cutting Out the New York Times poems, Missing Persons and Finding the One You Love is Finding Yourself, recent Wellesley graduate and Fuller Craft Museum Learning Programs Coordinator Deana-Rae Weatherly ‘22 ﬁnds the mirror in O’Grady’s words. She takes inspiration from the sous-realité that O’Grady articulates to mark her own moment of tran- sition. Patricia Birch, Wellesley’s Assistant Dean for Intercultural Education, Director of Harambee House, and Advisor for Students of African Descent, likewise sees herself in another 1977 poem, You Can Succeed in Your Own Business. In her own poetic response, Birch guides us through the collage’s impact on her bodily awareness of Blackness. Visiting Lecturer in Art Kelsey Miller considers both Cutting Out the New York Times and Cutting Out CONYT within the overwhelming, ubiquitous volume of text in today’s digital world. As we

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23move our eyes from screen to artwork to page to screen, our sur- and sous-realités have shifted, and Cutting Out CONYT insists on a bodily awareness of the act of reading, of looking. The Davis acquired the Sisters quadriptych of the Miscegenated Family Album when it was on view at the Museum in 1994. At the afore-mentioned panel, hosted by the Davis, during which she spoke, O’Grady also had the opportunity to listen: to a talk by Carol Dougherty, Professor of Classical Studies, whose text was published as a gallery guide. O’Grady found Dougherty’s analysis so useful that it is archived on her website, and the panel served as an inspiration for this e-book, the Teaching/Learning symposium (February 9, 2024), and O’Grady’s residency at the Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities (March 4-8, 2024). Dougherty analyzes the very nature of object-making, idea-making—and history-making. She interprets from O’Grady guidance for object-based learning relevant for all teaching at academic museums: [O’Grady] suests that we begin to value in their place the many stories these artifacts continue to generate—an ongoing and reciprocal dialogue between the past and present.An archaeologist and specialist in Nubian culture, professor Elizabeth Minor ‘03 enacts this close looking, helping us to imagine two mother’s gentle kisses on two babies’ faces, millennia and continents apart. She shows us how this act of imagination has profound implications for scholarly debates about race and ancient Egypt. 17. Four of the diptychs of edition 3/8, which O’Grady has also described as the “Sisters” quadriptych, are included in the Davis Museum collection: Miscegenated Family Album (Sisters I): L: Nefernefruaten Nefertiti; R: Devonia Evangeline O’Grady; Miscegenated Family Album (Sisters II): L: Nefertiti’s daughter, Merytaten; R: Devonia’s daughter, Candace; Miscegenated Family Album (Sisters III): L: Nefertiti’s daughter, Maketaten; R: Devonia’s daughter, Kimberley; and Miscegenated Family Album (Sisters IV): L: Devonia’s sister, Lorraine; R: Nefertiti’s sister, Mutnedjmet (1980/1994), Cibachrome prints, Museum Purchase, 1994.8.1.1-.2; 1994.8.2.1-.2; 1994.8.3.1-.2; 1994.8.4.1-.2.18. See Carol Dougherty “The Object of History and the History of Objects” (1994) in this volume on pages 110-112.

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24The eminent historian, University of Massachusetts Amherst Professor and Senior Associate Dean, Joye Bowman ‘74, co-authored a reﬂection with her daughter, Imani Hiinson ‘14, who has followed O’Grady into federal government service as a Senior Project Manager at the General Services Administration. Bowman graduated from Wellesley just under twenty years after O’Grady, and Hiinson another forty years later. Together, they observe the importance of O’Grady’s commitment to institutional critique in the intellectual work of Miscegenated Family Album. They see how O’Grady brings original vision to depicting an African diaspora violently erased by schools—including Wellesley— museums, and other institutions that claim to tell the story of the world.Renowned art historian and curator Alvia Wardlaw ‘69 also ﬁnds a mirror in Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, a character created to ﬁght against the same racist segregation of the artworld that Wardlaw has helped to dismantle with her scholarship. She also links her own revolutionary professional work to actions that she and her classmates began while at Wellesley, work that has been chronicled in the book Rebels in White Gloves: Coming of Age with Hillary’s Class — Wellesley ‘69.Iris Simone Haastrup-Sanders ‘22, a Gallery Assistant at the Jack Shainman Gallery, takes up another of O’Grady’s projects as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, The Black and White Show. She compares the racist segregation that O’Grady protested through curatorial work in 1983 with the ongoing limitations and obstacles that Black artists face in the commercial realm, and points to how we can continue to implement the changes for which O’Grady calls. As discussed above, in a little known detail, O’Grady wore her own white gloves from Wellesley pinned to her t-shirt during the 1983 African-American Day Parade in Harlem where she staged Art Is . . . .19. Miriam Horn, Rebels in White Gloves: Coming of Age with Hillary’s Class—Wellesley ‘69 (New York: Penguin Random House, 2000).

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25Professor Nikki A. Greene describes the many ways that she has taught with O’Grady and about O’Grady’s artwork since she began at Wellesley in 2012. Like Ludovissy, she sees how the mirror in O’Grady’s art multiplies for students studying her work. The Community and Family Engagement Coordinator at the Boston Children’s Museum, Regina Gallardo ‘23 describes the foundational impact of Art Is . . . on her understanding of art—and her choice to attend Wellesley. An artist herself, current student Chuxin Zhang ‘24 ﬁnds special inspiration in O’Grady’s collaborations with and support of other artists. Professor Rhonda Gray ‘95 teaches English at Roxbury Community College and yoga at Wellesley. She was among those students O’Grady had hoped to reach in 1994, but thankfully, she—and her students— are active participants in Both/And in 2024. For Gray, the series Body Is the Ground of My Experience (1991) has special resonance: O’Grady ﬁrst showed it during the year that Gray matriculated at Wellesley. It takes up questions of how our bodies shape our life experiences. Gray is working closely with Dr. Semente, Davis Curator of Education and Public Programs, to incorporate O’Grady’s Both/And conceptual inter-ventions into her class Yoga for Stress Relief. Lecturer in Africana Studies Liseli Fitzpatrick focuses on the same series, examining how it both reﬂects Black pedagogies and will be incorporated into Fitzpatrick’s own sacred Black pedagogy of creativity and resistance. Shannon O’Brien, Director of Editorial and Social Media at Wellesley, enters O’Grady’s visual exploration of connections between her own family’s history and nineteenth-century Parisian literature. Jeanne Duval (c.1820–c.1862), who was born in Haiti and spent about half of her life in Paris living with Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), takes center stage in Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good (1998–). In these studies, O’Brien sees something of herself and her family’s experiences just as O’Grady compared her own family narratives to Duval and Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century lives. Most importantly, O’Brien takes inspiration to craft her own stories, her own histories.

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26Two current students reﬂect on an artwork not included in Both/And, but rather archived on O’Grady’s website. A site-speciﬁc artwork in honor of a lost space for liberation, joy, and community, Persistent (2007) tells stories from the Davenport Lounge, a dance club that closed after serving as a safe haven for diverse dancers from around Texas. Shaela Sageth ‘26, who is from Texas, reﬂects on the role of the viewer of Persistent and on the debates about LGBTQIA+ rights that were happening as the Davenport closed and O’Grady memori-alized it. Kelly Song ‘24 poetically brings the reader into Persistent, into the Davenport Lounge, and into memory.I hope that faculty and students will use this publication as a launching pad, and to that end, it concludes with recommended further reading and viewing. Above all, spend time on O’Grady’s website! As Battat tells her students, it is a “researcher’s dream.”O’Grady’s conceptualization of Both/And calls for utter transformation in how we think—in how we teach and learn. I hope that this book supports the exhibition’s capacity to change Wellesley—to foster the liberatory, interdisciplinary learning to which many of us aspire. The College is certainly a different place than it was on that day in 1952, when O’Grady and her friends danced to Stravinsky on Severance Green. In 2024, seventy-two years later, Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And includes a selection from O’Grady’s ongoing series Announcement of a New Persona (Performances to Come!). In Family Portrait 1 (Formal, Composed), O’Grady looks straight at the camera in her gleaming bespoke suit of armor. The moment, the performance, that this image captures self-consciously engages with multiple histories: of Joan of Arc, European chivalric traditions, Don Quixote, colonization in Africa and the Caribbean, Caribbean carnivals, and O’Grady’s own life.20. See O’Grady’s “Career Narrative” in this volume on pages 31-37 and Lorraine O’Grady and David Velasco, “1000 Words: Lorraine O’Grady,” ArtForum (March 2021), https://www.artforum.com/features/lorraine-ogrady-talks-about-announcement-of-a-new-persona-performances-to-come-249369/ [Accessed January 5, 2024].

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28Here, O’Grady is the Knight, Lancela Palm-and-Steel. Writing about this series, she asks: “If you conceal everything—race, class, age, gender—what is left? What is possible?”Both/And opens up possibilities for seeing ourselves. Seeing each other. Seeing histories. Seeing the sous-realités on which we stand. Faculty and staff teach, and we also learn along with and from our students. This volume invites its readers—in classrooms, museum galleries, residence halls, libraries, and homes on Wellesley’s campus and around the world—to work together, to teach and to learn from Lorraine O’Grady’s Both/And.21. See O’Grady’s “Career Narrative” in this volume on pages 31-37.

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31O’Grady updated this biographical text on August 28, 2023. Lorraine O’Grady (b. 1934) is a concept-based artist and cultural critic widely regarded as a leading intellectual voice of her generation. Working across media and disciplines––including writing, photography, performance, curating, installation, and video––O’Grady continues to challenge artistic and cultural conventions through her incisive critique of the binary logic inherent in Western thought. She has skillfully deployed the diptych form to refute and subvert both the “either/or” logic of Western philosophy and, by extension, the prevailing understanding around gender, race, and class. Over the course of her career, she has advocated for an anti-hierarchical approach to difference that follows the reasoning of both/and. From her earliest work, Cutting Out the New York Times (1977), to more recent series like Family Portraits (2020), O’Grady has expanded the possibilities of conceptual art and institutional critique through her profound explorations of hybridism and multiplicity. And in writings such as “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” an inﬂuential essay of cultural criticism published in 1992, O’Grady continues to shape the theoretical contours of a body of work that has been ground- breaking in its charting of the emergence of black subjectivity in both artistic modernism and Western modernity as a whole. O’Grady came to artmaking in the late 1970s after having achieved professional successes as a research economist, a literary and commercial translator, and a rock music critic. Her decision to become an art maker being due to the desire to produce work in service of her own ideas, O’Grady has stated that art “is the primary discipline whereCareer Narrative Lorraine O’Grady

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32an exercise of calculated risk can regularly turn up what you had not been looking for.” Indeed, O’Grady’s strategies in Cutting Out the New York Times (1977) were propelled by her readings of Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. By 1980, she was afﬁliated with Just Above Midtown (JAM), the black avant-garde gallery founded by Linda Goode Bryant, where artists such as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, and Howardena Pindell were already active. O’Grady began by volunteering to work on communications for the gallery. It was during this time that she conceived of and ﬁrst performed her landmark work Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83). “A critique of the racial apartheid still prevailing in the mainstream art world,” MBN saw O’Grady perform as the invented titular character whose unannounced “guerrilla” actions intervened in public art events. While she deemed the performance a failure due to its not having begun a meaningful integration of black voices in the art world at the time, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire had a mythic aftermath that is felt to this day.While honing her artistic voice, O’Grady continued to write and publish. Her 1982 “Black Dreams,” featured in Heresies #15: Racism Is the Issue, was O’Grady’s ﬁrst attempt to publicly engage with issues of black female subjectivity. The essay employs personal anecdote and psychological description more than her later writings would, which though remaining accessible, gradually became more theoretical than narrative. In 1983, O’Grady, acting in her persona of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, curated a group exhibit, The Black and White Show, at the black- owned Kenkeleba Gallery, and staged her well-known performance Art Is . . . in Harlem. Both works continued her inquiry into the political and aesthetic complexities of an industry she experienced as persist-ently segregated. Her Central Park performance Rivers, First Draft (1982), alternated a second tendency of her work in this period, that of intense self-exploration. The work was a one-time only event with a cast and crew of 20, several of whom were part of JAM, including a young Fred Wilson and the late George Mingo. A “narrative three-ring circus of movement and sound” about a woman trying to become an

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33artist, Rivers, First Draft simultaneously expressed the protagonist’s perspectives as a young girl, a teenager, and an adult woman. Its characters also symbolized conﬂicting aspects of O’Grady’s identity as both a native New Englander and the child of black Caribbean parents. In 2015, she would re-imagine the work as a suite of 48 images displayed as a “novel in space.”Over the course of the 1990s, O’Grady’s voice became increasingly important to both the alternative New York art scene and mainstream artistic discourse. She was a member of the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC), to which she contributed a crucial intersectional viewpoint on feminist theory and praxis. In works such as Miscegenated Family Album (1980/1994), O’Grady synthesized history and identity, the personal and the political, by pairing photographic portraits of her family members with images depicting ancient Egyptian ﬁgures such as Nefertiti and her relations. O’Grady, whose antecedents include enslaved persons, views ancient Egypt as a “bridge” country, the cultural and ethnic amalgamation of Africa and the Middle East which ﬂourished only after its northern and southern halves were united in 3000 BC. The appropriation of the term “miscegenated” in conjunction with the use of ethnographic visual language poignantly addresses the hybrid experience of class, gender, and race across time. Through this lens, Miscegenated Family Album functions as a feminist opus whose goal is not to bring about a mythic “reconciliation of opposites” but rather to “enable or even force a conversation between dissimilars long enough to induce familiarity.”O’Grady has continued to push the limits of the diptych as a tool, concept, and symbol to this day. In works such as Body Is the Ground of My Experience (1991/2019), she created a number of photomontages, both diptychs and “collapsed diptychs,” that reprised several ideas from Rivers, First Draft in still form. These works engage with certain oversimpliﬁcations in postmodernist thought, which O’Grady believed “re-located subjectivity away from the body to history in a way conven-

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34iently serving those in power.” She employs a psychological literalness akin to Surrealism by situating “the black body as the literal ground [of the composition] on which history acts but is unexpectedly modiﬁed.” In her video Landscape (Western Hemisphere) (2010/2011), close- up shots of the textured waves of her hair invoke the contours of undulating landscapes viewed aerially. The work collapses the diptych into a single frame, an image of “the kind of miscegenated thinking that’s needed to deal with what we’ve already created here.” More recent works such as Cutting Out CONYT (1977/2017), ﬁnd O’Grady, as she does so often and productively, revisiting and reworking her earlier Cutting Out the New York Times to create a series of 25 “haiku- like” diptych-poems plus a single panel that serves as a “manifesto” for the entire suite. Enlarged reproductions of selected and now radically rearranged pages from her 1977 poems are cut and collaged by hand. Reﬂecting on the process of revising an important work made four decades earlier, O’Grady has written: “Cutting Out the New York Times (CONYT) had succeeded in its ﬁrst goal to make public language private, but it had failed, I believed, in its second goal—to create counter-confessional poetry. Too many rules of cutout composition had overwhelmed those poems of ten and twelve or even more panels each. But I thought forty years of experience might correct the failure. And they did.”Since before 2017, O’Grady has been developing a new body of work, an update of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire which centers on a new persona, that of “the Knight.” In her photo-installation Announcement Cards (2020), O’Grady introduces the Knight, a striking ﬁgure who wears custom-forged armor, in the Renaissance style of the conquistadors but topped with Caribbean headdresses emblematic of the Global South. The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel, is inspired by the stories of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, Joan of Arc, and Don Quixote, and also by Caribbean masquerade traditions, including the characters of “Courtier,” “Pitchy-Patchy,” and “Actor Boy” from the Jonkonnu festival of Jamaica. Like Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, the Knight,

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35too, will embark on a series of actions ranging from self-exploration to cultural critique, documented in both ﬁlm and photography. Comparing Lancela Palm-and-Steel to the image of “The Fir-Palm” in Body Is the Ground of My Experience, O’Grady remarks that “In the Knight, the position of the Caribbean is inverted; it is now the mind, not the body,” and afﬁrms that she needs the options in both images to speak her truth. As both art and cultural criticism, her new work is characteristic in its probing of complex and perhaps irresolvable questions: “If you conceal everything—race, class, age, gender— what is left? What is possible?”Lorraine O’Grady was born in Boston to parents from Jamaica. A talent-ed scholar, she was educated at the elite Girls Latin School before studying economics and Spanish literature at Wellesley College (Class of 1955). While still a student, she passed the US government’s chal-lenging Management Intern Program (MIP) exam and worked as a research economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1961, O’Grady left her post at the Dept. of Labor to write ﬁction, ultimately entering the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1965 following a 1963-64 stint at the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence Research, American Republics branch (INR/ARA). By 1968, she was working in Chicago at a commercial translation agency while volunteering for Jesse Jackson and his organization Operation Breadbasket. However, after opening her own translation agency and fulﬁlling major contracts for Playboy and Encyclopaedia Britannica, she decided to end her career as a translator. In 1973, O’Grady moved to New York and became a critic for Rolling Stone and The Village Voice, reviewing acts like the Allman Brothers, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, Bob Marley and the Wailers, and Sly and The Family Stone. After growing dissatisﬁed with her role in the music world, she accepted an offer to teach literature at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). There, she describes, “I felt I was home. I knew I was a visual artist.”

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36O’Grady has made important contributions to cultural criticism through both her art and her writing. In 1994, she doubled the length of her 1992 essay “Olympia’s Maid” by adding a remarkable “Postscript,” in which she expanded the argument on black female subjectivity with her pathbreaking theorizing of the Both/And. O’Grady also launched an artist website in 2008 that serves as a living public archive. And in 2010, she donated her analogue archive to Wellesley College, making it available for research to the student body and general public at large. A book of her collected writings, Writing in Space, 1973–2019, was published by Duke University Press in 2020.She has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibits, including: her ﬁrst retrospective, Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And, Brooklyn Museum (2021), which, accompanied by an informative catalogue, traveled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC (2022) and is on view at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in 2024; From Me to Them to Me Again, Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, GA (2018); Family Gained, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2018); Lorraine O’Grady: Initial Recognition, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Monastery of Santa María de las Cuevas, Seville, Spain (2016); and Lorraine O’Grady: When Margins Become Centers, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (2015). Her work has also been included in such exceptionally signiﬁcant group exhibitions as: Just Above Midtown: 1974 to the Present, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022); Michael Jackson: On the Wall, National Portrait Gallery, London (2018), which traveled to Grand Palais, Paris (2018), the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany (2019), and Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland (2019); Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Tate Modern, London (2017), which traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK (2018), Brooklyn Museum, NY (2018), The Broad, Los Angeles (2019), de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA (2019), and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2020); and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–85, Brooklyn Museum, NY

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37(2017), which traveled to California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2017), Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2018), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2018). In 2022, the University of California Press published a major monograph on her work, Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Language, by Stephanie Sparling Williams.Her work is represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Tate Modern, London; and the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, among many others. She has received numerous awards, including the 2023 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art; a 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art; the Skowhegan Medal for Concept- ual and Cross-Disciplinary Practices (2019); a 2015 Creative Capital Award in Visual Art; a Lifetime Achievement Award from Howard University, Washington, D.C. (2015); the Distinguished Feminist Award, College Art Association, New York (2014); an Art Matters grant (2011); a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship (2011); and the Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2008), among others.

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39O’Grady delivered this lecture on October 20, 1994 at the Wellesley College Roundtable, which was hosted by the Davis Museum.Perhaps I should begin by giving you some background on how the topic of “Diaspora and Hybridity” relates to me personally.My parents both came from Jamaica in the 1920s. They met each other in Boston at the tea table during a cricket match in which one of my uncles was bowling. It was the post–World War I period of the great West Indian migration, and most of their compatriots had settled in Brooklyn. In Boston, the tiny West Indian community could barely establish and ﬁll one Episcopal church, St. Cyprian’s.Growing up I understood that, as a ﬁrst-generation African American, I was culturally “mixed.” But I had no language to describe and analyze my experience. It’s hard to believe, but it’s been just two or three years since words like “diaspora” and “hybridity” have gained wide currency for the movement of peoples and the blending of two or more cultures. The lack of language, plus pressure to ﬁt in with my peers, combined to keep me from thinking about my situation consciously, from under-standing how I might both resemble and differ from my white ethnic classmates and my black friends.As a teenager with few signposts and role models, I was trying to negotiate between: (1) my family’s tropical middle- and upper-class British colonial values; (2) the cooler style to which they vainly aspired of Boston’s Black Brahmins, some of whose ancestors dated to beforeSome Thoughts on Diaspora and Hybridity: An Unpublished Slide Lecture Lorraine O’Grady

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40the Revolution; (3) the odd marriage of Yankee and Irish ethics taught at the public girls prep school where, after six backbreaking years that marked me forever, I was the ranking student in ancient history and Latin grammar; and (4) the vital urgency of the nearby black working-class culture, constantly erupting into my non-study life despite all my parents’ efforts to keep it at bay.I had a wildly unproductive young adulthood, spent rebelling against the conﬂicting values instilled in me. But though it may have been easy to say “a pox on all your houses,” eventually I realized that I had to inhabit each of them. Looking back, I can see that the diaspora experience, however arduous, has been critical for my life and work. Not so much in the mixed details of my background as in the constant process of reconciling them. Wherever I stand, I ﬁnd I have to build a bridge to some other place.For me, art is part of a project of ﬁnding equilibrium, of becoming whole. Like many bi- or tri-cultural artists, I have been drawn to the diptych or multiple, where much of the information happens in the space between, and like many, I have done performance and install-ation work where traces of the process are left behind.The new prism of diaspora-hybridity helped me see that the hybridized form and content of Miscegenated Family Album was symptomatic of larger forces just coming into focus in the culture as a whole. Though I had been operating primarily out of personal compulsion (to resolve a conﬂicted relationship with my dead sister) and the aesthetic neces- sities of the work, it contained what Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism (1993) called “overlapping territories and intertwined histories.”Miscegenated Family Album, the installation which is premiering now, is in fact extracted from an earlier performance, Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, which I did in 1980. Both pieces have beneﬁted from the

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41fact that, since 1980, the work of postcolonialist thinkers such as Said, Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, Gayatri Spivak, and Trinh Minh-ha has shown that our old idea of ethnicities and national cultures as self-contained units has become obsolete in an era when “there is a Third World in every First World, and vice versa.” In fact, we were never, even in situations of the most extreme brutality, hermetically sealed off from each other. This realization, marked out in cultural studies, has been paralleled in contemporary art with an additional understanding: that the intellectual, emotional, and political factors from which art is made have themselves not been segregated. We do not look at or produce art with aesthetics and philosophy over here, and politics and economics over there.In fact, as these false barriers fall, we ﬁnd ourselves in a space where more and more the entrenched academic disciplines appear inadequate to deal with the experience of racially and imperially marginalized peoples. Perhaps the only vantage point from which the center and the peripheries might be seen in something approaching their totality may be that of exile, or diaspora. As the twenty-ﬁrst century approaches, we could be facing a prolonged period of intellectual revisionism. Perhaps all of us, the newly de-centered as well as the already marginal, will have to adopt (in the spirit of Du Bois’s old theory of “double conscious- ness”) what Gilroy has called “the bifocal, bilingual, stereophonic habits of hybridity.”It’s true, diaspora inevitably involves sexual and genetic commingling. But this aspect of hybridity, though fascinating in itself, is not essen- tial to the argument I am making. “Diaspora,” a Greek word for the1. The formulation is that of Trinh T. Minh-ha, in the introduction to a special issue of the journal Discourse: Trinh T. Minh-ha, ed., “She: The Inappropriate/d Other,” Discourse, no. 8 (Fall/Winter 1986-87).2. This is a paraphrase of Paul Gilroy’s statement, which appears in the introduction of The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 3: he refers to “the stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms originated by, but no longer the exclusive property of, blacks dispersed within the structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering what I have heuristically called the black Atlantic world.”

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42dispersion or scattering of peoples, includes by extension the lessons that displaced peoples learn as they adapt to their hosts or captors. It is diaspora peoples’ straddling of origin and destination, their internal negotiation between apparently irreconcilable ﬁelds, that can offer paradigms for survival and growth in the next century. Well, I should say that the caveat is if, and always if, they choose to remember the process of straddling and negotiation and to analyze the resulting differences. A simplistic merging with the host or captor always beckons. But I do think that in a future of cultural crowding, the lessons of diaspora and hybridity can help us move beyond outdated originary tropes, teach us to extend our sensitivities from the inside to the outside, perhaps even help us maintain a sense of psychological and civic equilibrium.As an artist I like to be concrete. Perhaps this example from my own practice will show what I mean by hybridity, how a process and an object can be more than one thing at a time.Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline was the 1980 performance from which I later developed Miscegenated Family Album. It was an early attempt to treat these ideas in terms of my personal background. Of course, the performance wasn’t created in an emotional and intellectual vacuum: it was a working through of a troubled, complex relationship with my dead sister, Devonia, a relationship that ran the gamut from sibling rivalry to hero worship and was itself a sort of hybrid.The performance functioned on a lot of levels. On one level, that of a certain emotional distance, it dealt with the continuity of species experience—the old plus ça change plus c’est la même chose, or the more things change, the more they stay the same. While this idea might appear essentialist on the surface, I don’t feel there is any necessary conﬂict between permanence and change. To me, the continuity reﬂected in the piece’s dual images was a kind of geological substratum underlying what was in fact a drastic structural diversity caused by two

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43very different histories. The similarities in the two women’s physical and social attitudes didn’t negate the fact that Nefertiti had been born a queen and Devonia’s past included slavery. The performance was not “universalist” in the current sense of the term.My ability to think the two women, ancient and modern, in the same space came most immediately out of an experience I had in Egypt in the early ’60s. On the streets of Cairo, I’d been stunned to ﬁnd myself surrounded by people who looked like me, and who thought I looked like them. That had never before happened to me, either in Boston, where I was raised, or in Harlem, where I used to visit my godparents. All my life I had noted a resemblance between Devonia and Nefertiti. But in Cairo, I’d been jolted into an intuition of what that resemblance might be based on.When I returned to the States, I began an amateur study of Egyptology. Of course, without the beneﬁt of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, not published until 1987, I was really reinventing the wheel. I soon came to feel that many of Ancient Egypt’s primary structures—the dual soul, its king who was both god and man, the magic power invested in the Word, a particular concept of justice or maat, as well as its seemingly unique forms of representation—were, in fact, refractions of typically African systems. I could detect a ghostly image...a common trunk, off which different African cultures, north and south, east and west, had branched. It was signiﬁcant that the heroic period of Egyptian culture, the one that created the Egypt of our minds—that of the pyramids and hieroglyphic writing—came during the ﬁrst four dynasties at Thebes in the southern, “African,” part of Egypt. And yet traditional Egyptology, with few exceptions, such as the works of Henri Frankfort and E. A. Wallis Budge, had voluntarily impoverished itself by3. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 3 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986, 1991, and 2006). The ﬁrst two volumes had been published by the time O’Grady delivered these remarks.

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44not exploring the possibility of an African origin for these taxonomically “difﬁcult” structures, whose forms may have further hybridized with intercultural contact. Instead, the discipline in the ’60s and ’70s continued trying to ﬁt Egyptian culture into the “round hole” of the Near East. There seemed, on the part of most, to be an almost magical insistence that the cataracts of the Nile were somehow a more impassable barrier than the Alps or the Pyrenees.I should also say that there is no need, on the opposite side of the debate, for the unscholarly claim that Cleopatra was black. Like all the Ptolemies, the line of pharaohs imposed by Alexander the Great in Egypt’s waning years, Cleopatra was Greek. But 300 years of Greek Ptolemies could have little effect on the “African-ness” of three millen- nia of Ancient Egyptian culture, including the dynasty of Akhenaton and Nefertiti a thousand years before Alexander’s death blow. One of the concepts that enabled my use of historic imagery in Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline and the later Miscegenated Family Album was my suspicion that, like some ancient Cuba, Egypt had been hybrid racially...but, culturally, had been aboriginally black. Given the abysmal state of mainstream scholarship, the Africanist intuition was as good as any other. Stating that, though, seemed more a matter of intellectual necessity than simple nostalgia. European scholarship had converted Egypt into a kind of sui generis limbo, a rose blooming in the desert, severed both from its later “cuttings” in Greece and from its roots in Africa. The more primitive version of this had been in geography class, when our third-grade teacher had pulled the map of Africa down over the blackboard and said, “Children, this is Africa, except,” pointer poised on Egypt,“except Egypt, which is part of the Middle East.” For me, locating a sense of continuity by forcing the matter visually was a matter of intellectual sanity. The performance was not “Afrocentrist.” It had a political pedagogy that I could use in other ways.

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45I do think every good artwork is over-determined, with multiple composing elements. One of the primary conscious elements in Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline was something I would call, for lack of a better term, “subjective postmodernism.” Of course, to refer to the mix of ongoing personal, cultural, and aesthetic preoccupations in my work as “subjective postmodernism” is to deliberately ignore that it is an oxymoron. For subjectivity is the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater in the binarism of postmodern theory. When Western modernist philosophy’s “universal subject” ﬁnally became relativized (we know which race, we know which gender), rather than face life as merely one of multiple local subjects, it took refuge in deny-ing subjectivity altogether. In addition, contemporary theory stoutly denies its enduring binarism. But through its almost Manichean inability to contain nature and culture in a common solution, it tends to rigidly oppose nature and the “personal” on the one side, and culture and the “historic” on the other. All my work, including Nefertiti/ Devonia Evangeline and Miscegenated Family Album, is devoted to breaking down this artiﬁcial division between emotion and intellect, enshrined in the Enlightenment and continued by its postmodern avatars. It makes the historic personal and the personal historic.In my performances and photo installations, I focus on the black female, not as an object of history, but as a questioning subject. In attempting to establish black female agency, I try to focus on that complex point where the personal intersects with the historic and cultural. Because I am working at a nexus of things, my pieces necessarily contain hybrid effects. In Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, the aesthetic choice to combine personal and appropriated imagery worked, I think, in both traditional and postmodern ways. Using images with so uncanny a resemblance to my late sister and her family helped objectify my relationship to her and to them and may have given viewers a traditional narrative catharsis. On the other hand, because personal images were compared to images that were historic and politically contested, a space was created in which to make visible a

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46previously invisible class. They were also able to open out to other cultural, i.e., impersonal questions. The piece was not “individualist.”Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline and the later Miscegenated Family Album attempted to overcome artiﬁcial psychological and cultural separations through the strategies of hybridism. The work I am doing now in my studio continues these preoccupations but locates them in the more recent 19th century.For those of you who have just seen the Miscegenated Family Album installation here at the Davis Museum, or who may have seen images from it in your classes, I have tried to examine my practice in words that hopefully cut a crevice between the magic of the installation and my overdetermined creation of it. I wanted to set up a situation where the movement back and forth between the experience of the piece and the process of hearing me talk about it might be disorienting, might create the feeling of anxiously watching your feet as you do an unfamiliar dance. Because it’s what happens when you get past that, when you can listen to the music without thinking, that is most of what I mean by hybridism and diaspora.In addition to posting it on her website, O’Grady included this lecture in the recent collection of her writings. The “Unpublished Slide Lecture” ﬁrst delivered at Wellesley College is now published again. Lorraine O’Grady, “Some Thoughts on Diaspora and Hybridity: An Unpublished Slide Lecture (1994)”, in Writing in Space, 1973–2019, ed. Aruna D’Souza, pp. 119-125. Copyright 2022, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the Publisher. www.dukeupress.edu.All footnotes were added by Aruna D’Souza for the 2020 volume.

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47O’Grady delivered a version of this text as a lecture on March 15, 2012 during the programming for the exhibition This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s, curated by Helen Molesworth, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where it was on view from February 11, 2012 until June 3, 2012. Her lecture was cosponsored by the MCA Chicago and Columbia College, Chicago. The exhibition later traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (November 15, 2012-March 3, 2013).First, I must thank Helen Molesworth for curating such a brilliant and brave show and for allowing me to be part of it. This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s is an unusual exhibition. It attempts to deal historically with a period that has not yet disappeared, one that is still vexed in present memory. Its admirable qualities leap out at once—a refusal of the curatorial temptation to evaluate and re-categorize, its willingness to let the period “live free,” Molesworth’s exemplary admission of her own biases in shaping it. I won’t be responding to the show on the walls, but more to the catalogue—whose richness I can’t recommend highly enough—and to what a quiet reading of it in New York made me think and feel. Molesworth’s own extraordinary essay helped me get to a place it would have taken me years to reach otherwise. I am especially grateful to the invitation extended in its ﬁnal paragraph to others’ alternate visions of the period, its recognition that even those of us with similar goals can never be fully in sync but that, if we can express our differ- ences “without losing time,” we may get there in the end.None of the differences between my perception of the 1980s andMy 1980sLorraine O’Grady

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48Molesworth’s should be taken as a criticism of This Will Have Been, of course. If I saw the 1980s differently than Molesworth—and I did— my responses are more an attitudinal selection, my differences a case of the glass half-empty and half-full. Molesworth sees the 1980s as a moment of nascent ideas, as the incubator of an expanded “understanding of identity and subjectivity” which would arrive more fully in the 1990s—in effect, as the beginning of the postmodernist period. On the other hand, I see the 1980s as the last gasp of modernism, a modernism newly under pressure, un-self-conﬁdent, making a desper- ate last effort to control the narrative. Molesworth refers to feminism and the AIDS crisis as “stakes in the ground” shaping the contours of the vision of the 1980s that she explores in her show. For me, the theorizing of white feminism was one last cruel obstacle to be overcome. And AIDS was a source of private loss without outer acknowledgement. Though gay artists made some of the best art of the period, their work was not valued as it should have been, nor is it still. It sometimes feels as if the very centrality of homosexuality to the period may be the biest reason the 1980s are seen, to use1. The phrase is from Helen Molesworth, “This Will Have Been,” in This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012): 43. Writing of Félix González-Torres’s Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1987–90), “in which two store-bought clocks hang plainly, side by side,” Molesworth elaborates: “Synchronized at the time of their installation, they slowly, inevitably grow out of step with each other...Now, more than two decades later...these two clocks, ticking ever so slightly in and out of rhythm with one another, offer a model of history and subjectivity...There is never one story, one account, one sense of time that prevails. There is always more than one. The game—of history, of politics, of art, of love—is to ﬁgure out how to let the clocks strike differently without losing time.”2. Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973-2019, ed. Aruna D’Souza (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020): 94-109. This essay was ﬁrst presented at the 1992 College Art Association conference, and edited in 1994. It also appeared in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones (London: Routledge, 2010): 208–20 and Art, Activism, and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage, ed. Grant Kester (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).

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49Molesworth’s phrase, as “just too much.”However, I do agree with Molesworth that the 1980s may have been the “last movement,” the last to believe that art based in individual desire could be socially and culturally transformative. Sadly, individual desire is one of the human qualities most easily and effectively structured by political economy, which is to say, power. For me, it was at times infuriating to watch modernism’s end and postmodernism’s arrival being celebrated prematurely in the 1980s. Modernism was indeed coming to an end. But in the three decades since the start of the 1980s, some of us have had to live with failing attempts by the usual suspects to hold on to the old methodologies and “truths,” all the while proclaiming their departure a welcome farewell. Johanna Burton writes in her catalogue essay that the editors of October have at last thrown up their hands and declared that, to paraphrase, they can no longer analyze and predict. What a relief! The effort to control the narrative was a mandarin project like any other and was bound to fail in any truly postmodern era deﬁned by splintered consensus. 3. Molesworth 2012: 15.4. “The last movement” is the curator Ann Goldstein’s phrase to describe, according to Molesworth, “the last time artists, however seemingly disparate their respective bodies of work may have appeared, nonetheless held in com- mon a set of hopes and assumptions about the role of art in the public sphere.” Molesworth 2012: 17.5. It’s hard to avoid magical thinking with the term “postmodernism”—in my case, the barely disguised longing for pluralisms with enough weight to unseat the master narratives of modernism. In general, though, my deﬁnitions oscillate between the evolving and necessarily inconsistent view of postmodernism in the earlier and later Stuart Hall, i.e., between seeing it as a primarily American view of history (as in “the end of”) and then seamlessly appropriating it as an analytic tool to understand “globalized” ethnicity and the diasporic subject. I also wonder if the older white male audience member who, after this talk, advised me to use the word more carefully because postmodernism was not a sociological or cultural theory but an aesthetic style, might not have had a valid point.6. Johanna Burton, “A Few Troubles with ‘The Eighties,”This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012): 254.

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50The master narratives that characterized the we-they, top-down modernism typical of colonialist empire seem aberrant interruptions between, on the one hand, the totalizing narrative regimes of pre-modern, homogeneous cultures and, on the other, a newly postmodern globalized world in which all stories are becoming dangerously equal. The economic dispersal and ensuing fracture of the art ﬁeld of post-modernism that seems ﬁnally to have arrived in about 2008, with the worldwide economic bailout and the election in this country of Obama, are quite terrifying. And yet, the current moment feels safer for me. I am so glad I made it here, even though there’s no way to predict where this sundering of narrative unity is going. I spent all of the 1980s and the 1990s feeling, “God, will it never end? Will they never stop taking up all the room, stop speaking for themselves as though speaking for everyone?” The death of the author? The total construction of subjec-tivity? Sexual liberation as a prime victory of feminism? For you, perhaps. But for others, there was more. History as the single-minded story of the winners is something pre-modern and modern cultures have in common. But history has, in reality, always been just one story among many—and not always the most interesting, not always the most useful to the present. It was just the story that was needed to survive, to justify power, or the one capable of being understood with the mindset then available. I’d like to see the lost stories recuperated: stories to use, to amuse. I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, when you could take a course called “World Literature” in almost any university in the country and not encounter a single writer who was not either European or Euro-American. But you know, that was the story they were telling about the world then. Still, it was beautiful and edifying and exhausting, all that identiﬁcation with exotic characters, all that reading one’s self into their stories with nothing to compare.

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51But sometimes you have to tell your own stories, not just to understand yourself but to understand the world, to ﬁnd the space between their stories and yours, to learn what’s really going on. I often say that I was “post-black” before I was “black.” For a long time, I felt that I had escaped the limitations imposed by blackness. In those days, in the years well before 1968, living in my insular worlds of elite education and government employment, in a seeming meritocracy, I didn’t feel I had difﬁculty being noticed or being taken seriously. Then in 1977, when I was still post-black and experiencing the kind of personal crisis that now seems routine, I did a series of newspaper poems. But not like the Dadas and Surrealists—the former draft dodgers from World War I whom I’d been teaching—had done. World War I had been one of the stupidest and most devastating wars ever waged—more combatants were killed or wounded, or rather a greater percentage, than in World War II, and all for mysterious economic power reasons that nobody understood. Those artist sons of Europe, with their rigorous, old-fashioned educations, had been shocked to learn that beneath the rationalism drilled into them as Europe’s foun-dation was a blind irrationality that only occasionally saw the light of day. 7. The French forces had a 73 percent casualty rate (combined dead, wounded, imprisoned, and missing), an almost unimaginable ﬁgure. See John Graham Royde-Smith and Dennis E. Showalter, “World War I: Killed, Wounded, and Missing,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, published March 27, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-I/Killed-wounded-and-missing. The British Empire’s military deaths were three times those of World War II. Wikipedia, s.v. “World War I casualties,” last modiﬁed March 11, 2020, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties; and Wikipedia, s.v. “World War I casualties,” last modiﬁed February 29, 2020, http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/World_War_II_casualties.8. The preeminent war historian John Keegan has written: “The First, unlike the Second World War, saw no systematic displacement of populations, no deliberate starvation, no expropriation, little massacre or atrocity. It wasr...a curiously civilized war. Yet it damaged civilization, the rational and liberal civilization of the European enlightenment, permanently for the worse...Pre-war Europe, imperial though it was in its relations with most of the world beyond the continent, offered respect to the principles of constitutionalism, the rule of law and representative government. Post-war Europe rapidly relinquished conﬁdence in such principles.” John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Knopf, 1999): 6, quoted online in The New York Times, accessed September 10, 2012, www.nytimes.com/books/ﬁrst/k/keegan-ﬁrst.html?r=1.

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52One of the best pieces of public performance art I’ve ever heard tell of was performed by a regiment of ﬁve thousand French soldiers being marched to ﬁght in the trenches during that war. Each village the soldiers passed through, as they marched down the main street, they would baa (baaaa, baaaa) like sheep being led to the slaughter. As they left the town, they would fall silent again. The newspaper poems of the young Dadas and Surrealists were a self- conscious surrender to the random in order to expose it, to bring the irrationality out from where it lay hidden and create a surrealité, an “above” reality, they could beneﬁt from. My newspaper poems were almost the opposite of that. My last job with the government had been at the Department of State, in the Bureau of Intelligence Research (INR), the American Republics branch. It was during the Cuban crisis of the Kennedy years, and I had to read ﬁve to ten newspapers a day and plow through transcripts of three different Cuban radio stations. At a certain point in the day, you could watch language melt away. More than a dozen years later, in 1977, in my own little crisis, I started cutting headlines out of the Sunday New York Times. I would smoosh the cut scraps around on the ﬂoor until a poem appeared. My news-paper poems were more of a sous-realité, an “under” reality. They were an effort to construct out of that random public language a private self, to rescue a kind of rational madness from the irrational Western culture I felt inundated by, in order to keep sane. In 1977, I was still post-black, and the poems were all about universal stuff, the meaning of life and art and all that. I did a poem a week for twenty-six weeks, and they averaged about ten pages each. But in 1979 I had an epiphanic experience at 80 Langton Street, an alternative space in San Francisco. I’d gone to see Eleanor Antin, whose 100 Boots I adored. I had no idea what to expect. As it turned out, she was doing a performance of Eleanora Antinova, her black ballerina character who had danced with Diaghilev in Paris after World War I. I liked the concept, it made me think of my mother Lena, of what might have

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53happened had she emigrated from Jamaica to Paris as an eighteen-year-old instead of to Boston at exactly that time. But my mother was tall and willowy, the black ballerina type. And neither this short, plump white woman in blackface nor her out-of-kilter vision of the black character’s experience could compute for me. That was the moment I decided I had to speak for myself.In 1980 I volunteered at Just Above Midtown, the black avant-garde gallery founded by Linda Goode Bryant that had lost its space on Fifty-seventh Street and now had to create a new space in Tribeca. I became a sort of in-house gallery PR agent. One day, I called the New Yorker and spoke to the editor of “Goings On About Town.” I wanted her to list the gallery’s opening show, with pieces by David Hammons and others. JAM had never had a listing there, of course, nor had any of the other black galleries. I told her that the name of the show was Outlaw Aesthetics. When I heard her reply, my blood froze. “Oh, they always put titles on shows there, don’t they.” That was the moment I was transformed from post-black into black. Ah, recuperation. It’s so boring, especially if you don’t have anything to recuperate, if all your stories are already known by you and by all those who need to know them in order to survive. But if I must get my stories told so as to visualize the space between my stories and theirs and gauge where truth might lie, then they need me to tell my stories so as to do the same, to measure the distance between their stories and mine and ﬁnd a corrective truth for them. We must try to be analytic with our recuperation. But even so, it may be difﬁcult for some to realize that they need our stories both to under-stand themselves and to learn the selves they present us to deal with, to see accurately the world in which they increasingly must live. Since one of my projects in art is to make the invisible visible, I’d like to discuss a few pictures of a kind I imagine most have not seen before.

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54These are photos taken seventy-two years ago, in November 1939. The party is for my sister Devonia’s sixteenth birthday, and the young people range in age from ﬁfteen to nineteen. The girls are dressed in ﬂoor-length formal gowns, the boys are wearing suits and ties. An unusually attractive group as teenagers go, relaxed and jovial but still well-mannered, intelligent and poised. But if you look more closely, it can be unnerving. The group is so uniform, so carefully selected. These are not new friends; they have grown up together, been carefully vetted by complicit parents, groomed to compete successfully in every way. It’s the world of prewar Black Brahmin Boston, the world I came from and was in perpetual rebellion against. I was ﬁve years old at the time and not at the party. The chaperone, in whose home it was held, was my godmother Ruth Silvera, my mother’s best friend. Later, these young people would achieve great things. Catherine McCree’s brother Wade became Solicitor General of the United States, appointed by Jimmy Carter. Devonia herself would help to set up the country’s ﬁrst school social work program, in Stamford, Connecticut. But neither they nor memory of their accomplishments entered public consciousness. They were obliterated by glazed eyes programmed to eternally render them invisible. When the Obamas arrived unexpectedly seventy years later, those same eyes, with cauls suddenly removed, saw them as having dropped from Mars. Bless her heart, Michelle has always insisted, I’m not unique, I’m just one of thousands. She is, and not the most beautiful or the most brilliant. But she is one of the most self-conﬁdent. That woman has been well-loved.In 1980, after being transformed from post-black to black, I did my ﬁrst public art work, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, for the opening of Outlaw Aesthetics at Just Above Midtown/Downtown. She was a persona who wore a gown and a cape made of 180 pairs of white gloves, gave away thirty-six white ﬂowers, beat herself with a white cat-o-nine-tails, and

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55shouted poems that criticized the mindsets of the white and the black art worlds. It was a hard performance, perhaps the most difﬁcult I’ve done. I had to strip away everything that had been instilled in me at home and at school. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire wore a crown and a sash announcing the title she’d won in Cayenne, French Guiana, the other side of nowhere. (Black bourgeoise-ness was an international con-dition!) Her sash read “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 1955.” That had been the year her class graduated from Wellesley. The performance was done in 1980, so it was a jubilee year, a year in which she would enact a new consciousness. Well, not entirely. At Wellesley, I’d worn white gloves myself and still had them in a drawer. But I didn’t include them in the gown. I couldn’t go that far. After invading openings where she shouted poems against black caution in the face of an absolutely segregated art world, with punch-lines like “Black art must take more risks!” and “Now is the time for an invasion!,” Mlle Bourgeoise Noire became a sort of impresario. She presented events like The Black and White Show, which she curated at Kenkeleba, a black gallery in the East Village, in May 1983. The exhibition featured twenty-eight artists, fourteen black and fourteen white, and all the work was in black-and-white. The curating and the work were subtle, but the intention was perhaps not. To a blindingly obvious situation, sometimes you make an obvious reply. Another Mlle Bourgeoise Noire event was Art Is . . ., a September 1983 performance in the Afro-American Day Parade in Harlem. A quarter-century later she would convert photo-documents of the performance into an installation, a selection of which is on view in This Will Have Been. When she presented these events, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire would pin her own gloves—the gloves she’d lacked resolve enough to put into

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56the gown—onto her chest as accessories. Perhaps she was getting stronger.People often ask me to compare the live performance of Art Is . . . and the installation, but I can’t. They were incommensurate events. The day of the parade was hot, one of the hottest of the summer. There were a huge number of ﬂoats and marching bands, and they each had to wait on a side street before they could get en route. We shared the block with the Colt 45 group for almost four hours before our turn came. While we waited, the young actors and dancers I’d hired, none of whom may have known each other previously, began to bond. And some did more than that, I’m sure. It was that kind of day. We got onto the parade route about 1:00 p.m., and by the time we ﬁnished it was almost 6:00. I’ve never had a more exhilarating and completely undigested experi-ence in my life. The ﬂoat was stop-and-stall, sometimes for ﬁfteen minutes at a time. At other times, it would be moving so fast that in order to stay in line, you had to run like crazy, or just jump on and ride. I wasn’t from Harlem, so half the time I didn’t know what I was looking at. But I had deliberately not put the ﬂoat into the West Indian Day parade in Brooklyn, where I would have felt at home, because I didn’t think avant-garde art could compete with real carnival art. I felt it might do better with the oompah-oompah marching bands and the beer company ﬂoats. The fact that I didn’t know what to expect is what made the performance a personal challenge and may have made it ultimately successful. It was scary because I had no idea if it would work. But in the end, I think it met the challenge of the black social worker who’d told me in our Heresies issue collective, “Avant-garde art doesn’t have anything to do with black people!” There were more than a million people on the parade route, and time and time again we had conﬁrmation that the majority of them understood that the piece, and their participation in it, was art. “Frame me! frame me! make me art!” we heard. And

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57“That’s right! That’s what art is. We’re the art!”I was on a bier high at the end of the parade than I can tell you. But at the same time, I couldn’t describe what my full experience had been. There were hundreds of slides taken that day. In 2008, I took the images out of their storage box and made a time-based slideshow for my website using forty-three of them. But the sequentiality of the slideshow didn’t do it for me. A year later, for Art Basel Miami Beach, I reduced the slides to forty and made a wall installation, totally rearranging and mapping them. When I saw them like that—spatially, all over and at once—I felt I could ﬁnally intuit what the experience had been. But only what it had been for me. Although it had been a joyous occasion, it wasn’t the joy that attracted me. It was the complexity, the mystery, the images that no matter how hard I looked would never become clear, would always remain out of reach. The guy in the photo I call “Caught in the Art”...I could never have imagined him there. I made him the center of the installation. And the place in the next photograph! I could write a novel about what I can see and can’t see here. The ambiguous gesture of a girl pointing. The girl is delightful, but is her response one of ironic complicity or is it dismissive?By the mid-1980s, Linda Bryant and Just Above Midtown had fallen on hard times. In the same way she’d been the ﬁrst to put titles on her shows—something later done routinely—Linda was the ﬁrst to see the need to move from Tribeca to lower Broadway, the ﬁrst to understand the role of cafés and ofﬁce space rentals in supporting alternative art spaces. I’m not sure the funding agencies got her. In any case, it became impossible for JAM to support its artists’ careers. I think it

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58closed in 1985. Most of the artists drifted to academia or to other straight jobs. As for me, I found myself having to care for my mother, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The photo here is from the good days of Lena, otherwise known as “she who must be obeyed” and, lately, “the will-have-been black ballerina.” In 1988, I did my ﬁrst tentative wall piece, the Sisters quadriptych that would later evolve into Miscegenated Family Album. In 1989, I made a decision to perform Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline for the last time. While looking with a desultory glance over my shoulder, I couldn’t believe what I saw happening. Adrian Piper, after the imposing retro-spective at Geno Rodriguez’s Alternative Museum, and David Hammons, after a great show at Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo’s Exit Art, were being recuperated! My exultation was short-lived. Oh God, they’re doing it again! Reme-dying the situation so nothing will change. Fostering a few successful careers but staying in control of the narrative. In 1988-89, I was at my mother’s place in Brookline, Massachusetts, living in the madness there. And that was the end of my 1980s. You know, I’m still hopeful. But I have to acknowledge that change can be glacial. I may feel that 2008 was a turning point, but it’s so recent that I can’t see its outline. Your guess is as good as mine. Will the arrival of the real postmodernism bring a moment when we are all ﬁnally just an “other” of someone else’s other? I can’t imagine how long that will take. I mean, for me the 1980s took forever to end. A version of this essay was ﬁrst published by CAA in the Summer 2012 issue of Art Journal (Volume 71, Number 2) as “This Will Have Been: My 1980s.” It is also included in O’Grady’s collected writings: Lorraine O’Grady, “My 1980s (2012)”, in Writing in Space, 1973–2019, ed. Aruna D’Souza, pp. 203-212. Copyright 2022, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the Publisher. www.dukeupress.edu.

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59Rivers and Just Above MidtownLorraine O’GradyO’Grady read this introduction at a symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 at MoMA PS1 on February 8, 2013. She ﬁrst published the second section, “Text” in Lorraine O’Grady, an exhibition catalogue published by the Alexander Gray Associates in 2015.Intro (2013)[As captioned slides of the Rivers, First Draft installation were projected on the screen behind her, O’Grady read the following text.]The Rivers, First Draft installation consists of photos from a perfor-mance done in Central Park as part of “Art Across the Park” in summer 1982. Together, the curator and I made an exhausting tour of the Park to look at suitable locations.When she and I reached The Loch, a little-known section at the Park’s northern edge, it captured me. This wasn’t the Frederick Law Olmsted I thought I knew. It was wild and frighteningly unkempt, like something out of literature, not the city. And it was perfect for the piece I needed to create.Rivers would be a one-time only event with a cast and crew of 20, several of whom, including a young Fred Wilson and the late George Mingo, were part of Just Above Midtown, the black avant-garde gallery I was associated with then. The piece would be performed for an1. Just Above Midtown/Downtown members mentioned in text: Linda Goode-Bryant, David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, Houston Conwill, Randy Williams, Tyrone Mitchell, George Mingo, Fred Wilson, Sandra Payne, Cynthia Hawkins, Coreen Simpson, Dawoud Bey, Danny Dawson, Charles Abramson, Dan Concholar, Candida Alvarez, plus Lowery Simms and Kynaston McShine.

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60invited audience barely twice as large as the cast, no more than 40 people, nearly all with JAM or part of its environment. And there was an uninvited audience of about 5 passers-by who’d come on the scene accidentally and stayed. One, a young Puerto Rican taking a shortcut from the pool where he worked as a lifeguard, said afterward it was like walking into one of his dreams.The piece was a narrative three-ring circus, about a woman trying to become an artist. In it, her present and past happen simultaneously.It was called Rivers, First Draft because it was done quickly and I knew I would have to go back to it. It was always meant to be the ﬁrst of a three-part piece called Indivisible Landscapes: Rivers, Caves, Deserts. But perhaps when I revisit it, it will be unrecognizable. For me now, the making of Rivers and what it uncovered was one of the most important moments of my artistic and personal life and could not have happened without Just Above Midtown, a nurturing space when others would not have us.For me, doing Rivers in the context of Just Above Midtown was a unique art-making moment, one when the enabling audience—the audience which allows the work to come into existence and to which the work speaks—and the audience that consumes the work were one and the same.The installation being projected here is silent when on the wall or on pages in a catalogue, titles newly added. Imagine my voice now reading a text which bears on it only tangentially. Of course, you may not be able to follow the installation and the spoken text simultaneously. But whether you wander in and out of the installation and the text in alter- nation, or attend to them sequentially, it’s OK. Cognitive dissonance can be overcome when you slow down and repeat.[After a seven-second pause, the slideshow and reading are repeated.]

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61Text (2015)She’d been invited to speak, asked to address the differences between East Coast and West Coast artists at Just Above Midtown. But she hadn’t experienced it that way. She’d come late to the party, late to art. By 1980, when 57th Street was gone, when the gallery was re-opening in Tribeca, they had long forgotten their resentments. It was a family now, dysfunctional perhaps, but one where everyone felt free. On one wall, an installation of Artforum covers. On another, an altar to Santería gods. And in the basement, directors who were often better artists than some of those they showed.JAM was a complete world. Between the business model of the gallery and the clubhouse model, JAM was deﬁnitely the clubhouse where people gathered. It was sometimes hard to know who was a JAM artist and who was not. David deﬁnitely, and Senga and Maren, and Houston and Randy. But what about Tyrone? He was nominally with Cinqué, but was he ever not at JAM? Did George ever have an exhibition there? Did it matter? Everyone knew how good his work was. Then there were young artists ﬁnding their voices, like Sandra and Cynthia.But artists were just one part of the whole. There were art historians in potentia, like Judith Wilson and a young Kellie Jones. Photographers documenting others’ work and doing their own, like Coreen, like Dawoud. There were intellectuals like Danny and pure spirits like Charles. And there were curators. Lowery was always there. Kynaston never was, but his presence hung like a shadow on the wall. His was one way to be, she thought. She could have made that her goal. It was easy when whiteness was part of what you were. But instead she had come here.JAM was an esprit formed in exclusion. A kind of isolation that brings strength, brings weakness, brings freedom to explore and to fail, to ﬁnd the steel hardened within. David did his originary work there, as

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62did others. Reﬁnements would come later, of course, but if they were lucky, the rough edges would remain. Integrity, originality, adventurous- ness, those were Linda’s ideals. In truth, she was inspired by Linda, the founder-director, more than by the artists there. But mostly she felt at home. JAM was a place as much as a world, a place where people ate together, discussed and argued, drank and smoked together, collaborated on work, slept together, pushed each other to go further, and partied ’til the cows came home. There was even space for those who didn’t quite ﬁt, like Dan, like her. She was embarrassed by her age. She was becoming aware of it. It was now or never.The new space on Franklin Street took longer to ﬁnish than expected. The sun beat down outside the Riverrun Café, on tables laden with large glasses of ice-cold white wine.Arguments inspired by articles in Artforum sometimes went nowhere. For each person peering out at the art world of Castelli and Sonnabend, there was another for whom THIS was the art world that mattered, the one where the art was most advanced, and where the artists were most cosmopolitan. It was hard to argue with that. Whereas for white artists, traveling between European capitals was still considered urbane, by 1980 Senga had lived in Japan, Tyrone had lived with the Dogon in Africa. The mid-day discussions were sharp, funny, sarcastic. In the evening, they got even more so as the scene switched to outdoor tables in the East Village where the arguments were complicated by the circles around Steve Cannon, Quincy Troupe, and Ishmael Reed.It’s hard to remember what happened where, but JAM’s energy seemed always the focus. An endless progression of the toughest jazz she’d ever heard, dance performances alone and as part of the art work. It seemed Pina Bausch’s inﬂuence was God. And always, JAM was a place to hook up with friends. Dawoud and Candida had their wedding there.

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63These, ﬁnally, were her people. When she did Rivers, First Draft, she wanted them to understand...what route she’d taken to becoming an artist, what being West Indian was like, the mapping of the world of a Black Bohemian. And then she wondered if it were not already too late, if the Black Bohemian were not long enough gone as to be almost inscrutable. But she felt herself gain in incremental respect as the audience of JAM watched her strule and grow. That was enough.“Intro,” Conference presentation from symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 at MoMA PS1, February 8, 2013. Organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and curated by Kellie Jones, Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 was on view at MoMA PS1 from October 21, 2012 until March 11, 2023. “Text,” Lorraine O’Grady, (New York: Alexander Gray Associates, 2015). https://www.alexandergray.com/attachment/en/594a3c935a4091cd008b4568/Publication/594a3ceb5a4091cd008b71f9 [Accessed December 12, 2023]. This publication accompanied the exhibition Lorraine O’Grady, which was on view at Alexander Gray Associates from May 28 until June 27, 2015. The combined texts were published in O’Grady’s collected writings: Lorraine O’Grady, “Rivers and Just Above Midtown (2013, 2015)”, in Writing in Space, 1973–2019, ed. Aruna D’Souza, pp. 213-216. Copyright 2022, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the Publisher. www.dukeupress.edu.

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67On Creating a Counter-Confessional PoetryLorraine O’Grady as told to Lauren O’Neill-ButlerThe publication of this interview in ArtForum on November 19, 2018 coincided with three solo exhibitions in 2017 and 2018: Lorraine O’Grady: Cutting Out CONYT, Alexander Gray Associates (October 25-December 15, 2018) Lorraine O’Grady: From Me to Them to Me Again, SCAD Museum of Art (September 20, 2018- January 13, 2019) Lorraine O’Grady: Family Gained, Museum of Fine Arts-Boston (August 11-December 2, 2018)The form of my work has proven to me to be more important than the content. If you had told me when I started forty years ago that I would be saying that, I would probably have laughed. But the diptych has always been, in a sense, my primary form, even in the performances. For me, the diptych can only be both/and. When you put two things that are related and yet totally dissimilar in a position of equality on the wall, for example, they set up a conversation that is never-ending. It’s a totally unresolvable, circular conversation. And I think that that “both/and” lack of resolution—the acceptance and embrace of it, as opposed to the Western “either/or” binary, which is always exclusive and hierarchical—needs to become the cultural goal. The diptych, which is actually anti-dualistic, has served me to make the point against “either one, or the other.”I taught a course in Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism at the School of Visual Arts for twenty years. I admired those artists that dodged the draft in World War I and went off to Zurich. But I also felt they’d suffered an acute shock: Their teachers and parents, formed in the nineteenth century, had led them to believe that European culture was built on the mind, on rationality. And then, of course, they’d had

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68to face the irrationality of European culture with the outbreak of a war that even today makes no real sense. Their response to that was to willingly surrender to the irrationality they’d witnessed, and to create from the language of the subconscious a sur-realité, an above-reality. While I understood their need to surrender to the random, that could never ever interest me as a goal, since I’d always felt the culture I was immersed in was completely irrational. My trajectory instead was not to surrender but to try to conquer the random, to wrest some rationality from the irrationality that so many “others” to the normative culture have to live with.When I hit the New York art world in the early 1980s, it was a shock to my system. Not only was it segregated between races—it was also segregated along lines that were so subjective there was no logical countering of them. Everywhere I’d been in the world up to that point there had at least been objective measurements of my accomplish-ments, from SATs to exams for federal service. The year I graduated from college, out of twenty thousand who took the Management Intern Exam I was one of two hundred, and the ﬁrst girl from Wellesley, to pass. I didn’t have to prove myself. And later, when I became a translator, I mean, either you could translate accurately or you couldn’t. So when you come into the art world and you see a totalized worldview that is quite provincial, because it’s isolated everything but itself, and that’s what’s telling you that you are derivative—that you are not interesting—well, it seemed a little out of line with reality. But now I think it was more like a dislocation from reality, an exaeration of the irrationality that, as a woman of color, I had experienced all along.What I found in Surrealist language was the obverse of what the Surrealists had found: it enabled me not to surrender to the random but to control it. That’s why I did Cutting Out the New York Times (CONYT) in 1977. During the 1960s Cuban Missile Crisis I’d been a contract analyst at the Department of State and had to read like ten newspapers and three transcripts of Cuban radio a day, so language

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69had just melted away at that point. I wanted to see if I could take the public language of the New York Times and make it personal. And unlike the confessional poets of the time who confessed from the inside out, I wanted to see if I could create a “counter-confessional” poetry that would “confess” from the outside in.In 2017, forty years later, I felt an urgent need to reconnect to the voice of that 1977 piece, which I’d begun as a writer but ﬁnished more as a visual artist. The shock of entering the art world in 1980 had caused a distortion in what I produced, it seemed, away from the more experiential and toward the more argumentative. I wanted to go back to that earlier voice so as to get on with new work. Cutting Out the New York Times (CONYT) had succeeded in its ﬁrst goal to make public language private, but it had failed, I believed, in its second goal—to create counter-confessional poetry. Too many rules of cutout composi- tion had overwhelmed those poems of ten and twelve or even more panels each. But I thought forty years of experience might correct the failure. And they did.At ﬁrst, I felt simple relief. I called the show at the Savannah College of Art and Design From Me to Them to Me Again to signal a return. But now I think that was the wrong title. I should have called it From Me to Them to We Again. Because creating these totally new haiku-like objects in Cutting Out CONYT had not only illuminated the role of the diptych in my personal work, it had given me a glimpse into what might be my contribution to culture as a whole.This ﬁrst appeared in the Interviews section of the Artforum website, accompanied by a video of O’Grady speaking. Lorraine O’Grady as told to Lauren O’Neill-Butler, “On Creating a Counter-Confessional Poetry,” November 19, 2018. https://www.artforum.com/interviews/lorraine-o-8217-grady-on-creating-a-counter-confessional-poetry-77735 [Accessed November 10, 2023]. Reprinted with the permission of Lorraine O’Grady and Lauren O’Neill-Butler.

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71From Me to Them to Me Again: Text in Three Parts to Accompany a Diptych PortfolioLorraine O’GradyO’Grady ﬁrst published Diptych Portfolio and its accompanying text in the edited volume, Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value, edited by C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp, in 2020.Introduction (2019)In 2017, I felt a desperate need to reconnect to the voice I’d had before entering the art world, so it could help with a new body of work I expected to be more personal. In 1977, after attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for ﬁction, after being a literary translator and a rock critic, and after teaching humanities at the School of Visual Arts in New York, I’d had a crisis of the female body: a breast biopsy that proved negative. I was so relieved, I made a newspaper poem from the Sunday New York Times as a thank you present for my doctor and was surprised how good it felt, how good the poem was. I kept going and made one each Sunday, cutting out every section but the employment and real estate ads for six months. I was a writer when I began Cutting Out the New York Times (CONYT) in June 1977. When I ﬁnished in November of that year, I knew that I’d also become a visual artist.But entering the art world three years later disoriented me. It was the most segregated world I’d yet been in, with an irrationality too defended to counter. After devoting so much time to explaining “it” to me, confronted with an intransigent art world, now I was explaining “it” to them. In 2017, forty years later, I returned to the 1977 series in order to connect to the sound of my old voice. But before the earlier piece could realign me with who I had been, I would have to bring it closer

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72to who I was now. I created a new series from it using what I had learned since. Though CONYT may have succeeded in its goal of making public language private, the new radically selected and rearranged “haiku diptychs” of Cutting Out CONYT (1977/2017) would be the counter-confessional poetry CONYT had only dreamed of. Once ﬁnished, I basked brieﬂy in a job well done. And then it was 2018.No one could take away my accomplishment with the new series, but like minority artists everywhere, I would have to do more. It’s not enough to make the work. First, one may have to answer questions of motivation: Why this? Why now? What are you doing? More often, one must ﬁnd or invent language so the work can be understood, be seen, by us as well as them. This can frequently take years. I love the quote by Toni Morrison: “the function, the very serious function of racism... is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explain-ing over and over again.” It can also make you forget that that’s what you’ve been doing. When I look back at the two statements that follow, made twenty years apart, I must ask: To what extent have I been repeating myself? Did I get somewhere? Can my images at last speak for me? Where must I go? What must I do with what I see here?exhibit A (1998)the diptych vs. the triptychExcerpt from an unpublished conversation between Lorraine O’Grady and a studio visitor, September 12, 1998VISITOR: You’ve said your work is an argument against Western dualism. But if that’s the case, why do you use two panels? Doesn’t that just reinforce the basic idea? Why not the triptych instead?1. Toni Morrison, “A Humanist View,” May 30, 1975, Portland State Black Studies Center, transcript, https://www.mackenzian.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Transcript_PortlandState_TMorrison.pdf.

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73LORRAINE O’GRADY: I know it seems odd, but this is one case where reality does not support common sense. You’d think that dualism would be reproduced in two panels, but it can’t be. Two does not equal two here, no matter how it might appear at ﬁrst. It took me a while to ﬁgure out that, in Western dualism, there’s a kicker, and it’s hierarchy.VISITOR: Which means?O’GRADY: Since Western dualism is hierarchical, there can’t be balance or equation: good is not the obverse of evil, and a full acknowl-edgment of both isn’t needed to achieve balance in the world. For harmony, good must simply rule evil.And the corollaries to that are endless. White doesn’t equal black, male doesn’t equal female, culture doesn’t equal nature. ...Something is always better than. Despite its name, the binary contains a hidden third term that accounts for the superiority of one side of the binary over the other. It’s the thing that has been “passed through,” the thing that has been experienced or received, that makes it higher in value, like the blessing of Abel over Cain, or of Jacob over Esau. The Western binary isn’t really a two—it’s a three, with an implied beginning, middle, and end. It’s a narrative that goes from fallen to saved.VISITOR: You mean the binary is a triptych, not a diptych...O’GRADY: Yes, I think you could say so. ...The diptych may have two panels, but it’s nothing like the binary, in that it isn’t “either/or.” There’s no implied before and after, no being saved. The diptych is always “both/and,” at the same time. And with no resolution, you just have to stand there and deal.

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74exhibit B (2018)notes on the diptych, 2018Excerpts from emails, notes, and interviewsIf you had told me when I started forty years ago that the form of my work would prove to be more important than the content, I would probably have laughed. But the diptych, whether expressed or implied, has always been my primary form, even in the performances and videos where there is always more than one idea, more than one emotion at a time. For me, the diptych can only be “both/and.” When you put two things that are related yet dissimilar in a position of equality on the wall, they set up a ceaseless and unresolvable conversation. The diptych, appearances to the contrary, is anti-dualistic. That’s why it’s been my weapon of choice to oppose the West’s “either/or” binary, which is always exclusive and hierarchical. I feel that the “both/and” lack of resolution, an acceptance and embrace of it, is what needs to become the cultural goal.November 19, 2018The “haiku diptychs” of Cutting Out CONYT allowed me to maintain the tensions between my more explicit and less explicit voices.Whether personal/political, expressive/argumentative, inner-directed/ outer-directed, or post-black/black, these two voices form the para-meters of my work, describing and circumscribing diaspora mind, diaspora experience.2. Lorraine O’Grady, revised excerpt from “Lorraine O’Grady on Creating a Counter- Confessional Poetry,” interview by Lauren O’Neill-Butler, Artforum.com, November 19, 2018, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/lorraine-o-8217-grady-on-creating-a-counter-confessional-poetry

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75Ultimately, there was no extrication of the personal from the political, the expressive from the argumentative, because these qualities were not opposites, but obverse and reverse sides of the same coin. The diptych structure and the surrealist tone both express and argue the dichotomy. Even categorizing or referring to the divisions and splits feels like a regression back to hierarchies, a submitting to the binaries, not overcoming them.May 22, 2018In the end, I may just have lucked out. The newspaper poem’s surrealist language is constantly exploding at the edges of the mind. You understand it for a moment. Then no sooner than you fall in love, it disappears. And you have to start over again. It was like some crazy objective correlative to the diptych’s endless, elliptical movement. But it was beautiful. And it was the best, ﬁrmest example of “both/and” thinking I’d had.October 26, 2018First published as Lorraine O’Grady, “Diptych Portfolio,” Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value, eds. C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020): 155-168. © 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted with the permission of MIT Press.

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76Diptych PortfolioLorraine O’GradyO’Grady ﬁrst published Diptych Portfolio and its accompanying text in the edited volume, Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value, edited by C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp, in 2020.[Image captions for pages 77-84]Lorraine O’Grady (American, born 1934). Faces of MBN, from the series Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Goes to the New Museum, 1981/2019. Digital images of diptych artist sketch, dimensions variable. © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, and Mexico City).Lorraine O’Grady (American, born 1934). Moments of Perception, from the series Art Is . . . , 1983/2019. Digital images of diptych artist sketch, dimensions variable. © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, and Mexico City).Lorraine O’Grady (American, born 1934). The Clearing: or, Cortés and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me, 1991. Left: Green Love; right: Love in Black-and-White. Digital prints from analog photomontages, 40 X 100 in (101.6 X 254 cm) (diptych). © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, and Mexico City).Lorraine O’Grady (American, born 1934). Artist sketch for Haiku Diptych 3, from the series Cutting Out CONYT, 1977/2017. Scans of original newsprint cutouts collaged on rag bond papers, 8 1/2 X 11 in (21/6 X 27.9 cm) each. © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, and Mexico City).

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87This proﬁle was ﬁrst published in the online magazine Seen in 2023. In October 2022, over 600 Black women gathered in Venice, Italy and sat dutifully over three days in an elaborate hall at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, on the occasion of US Pavilion artist Simone Leigh’s three- day long symposium Loophole of Retreat: Venice.Organized by practitioner Rashida Brumbray to platform the creative responses of Black women cultural workers, makers, and thinkers across nations and generations, the symposium spanned ﬁve directives: maroonage, manual, magical realism, medicine, and sovereignty. Our souls were rocked and emboldened by over 50 presentations of deeply emotive expressions of selfhood and kinship. In the moment and even more so retrospectively, it is apparent to me that a twenty-ﬁrst century Black Feminist biennale was convened on the island of San Giorgio Maiore in the Venetian lagoon, and this intelligence and sensitivity was art in itself.The ﬁnal day of Loophole closed with a peer-to-peer conversation between Simone Leigh and conceptual artist and writer Lorraine O’Grady, who thanked Leigh for being “the other side of the same coin.” In 2018, at the inaugural Loophole of Retreat, hosted at the Guenheim Museum in New York, O’Grady shared her belief that we, Black women, had reached a “critical mass.” Reﬂecting upon those words four years later, she noted that they felt “like a lifetime ago, because we are no longer afraid of being lonely.” She continued, “We are connected. We are no longer standing still, defending a position, we’re going forward. Lorraine O’Grady: Through the Loophole and Back Rianna Jade Parker Writer, Curator, and Researcher

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88This movement is unstoppable.”A few days after the convening’s closing, I sat with O’Grady in the kitchen of her niece’s North London home, all of us still in the Loophole of Retreat, metaphorically. From my own understanding, a good critical mass creates a sustainable and expansive chain reaction towards a shared project of liberation and upfulness. Critical mass does not trickle down from the top; instead the power sits in the palm of each hand. Take, for example, Leigh and O’Grady’s “Ask Me Anything About Aging”—a 2016 workshop, presented as part of Simone Leigh’s Psychic Friends Network residency at Tate Modern in 2016. With it, Leigh and O’Grady demonstrated the beneﬁts of intergenerational word-of-mouth and sharing knowledge and strategy among women. But the symbolic gesture of Black women convening into a concentrated mass is only useful if we simultaneously discard the belief that a single proportion holds the key to all representational needs, emancipatory knowledge, and desires.While O’Grady was born in Boston to middle-class Jamaican immi-grants, it was not until the occasion of her 2021 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum that this fact was emphasized. She confessed to me: “In the catalogue I come out as a Diasporan artist. That took a lot of thought, you know. Am I going to do this or am I not? And what am I going to lose if I do this? I didn’t have a position that was clearly stated. I was just moving. I really found out that I couldn’t talk about being West Indian without somehow seeming to be claiming superiority. So, I sometimes feel like I’m a person who has not been allowed to have an identity. People would dislike me or the work because it wasn’t idealizing the Black family. Every time I was critical of my family, it was like I was saying something wrong. And so I ﬁnally had to come out as somebody who was ﬁghting a different set of battles.”In one early effort to address her West Indian and New England up-bringing, O’Grady created her most personal work to date, Rivers, First

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89Draft (1982). The one-time only performance took place in the seldom visited Loch, a northern section of New York’s Central Park. The script was redrafted until the day of performance, with a cast and crew of 20, most of whom, including a young Fred Wilson, were associated with the Black-owned gallery Just Above Midtown. After being rejected from the closed “studio of Black Male Artists,” three characters representing key stages of O’Grady’s life, named simply the Woman in Red, the Little Girl in a Pink Sash, and the Teenager in Magenta help guide each other down the stream of the Loch, aided by the Nantucket Memorial statue. In 2015, the work, which lives on as a 48-piece photographic installation, was donated to the Tate Modern by Eastman Kodak but shamefully remained taped up in a basement until 2022 because the deed of gift had not been signed and no one regarded the works highly enough to track the artworks down. But O’Grady persisted.A few years prior to Rivers, at age 45, O’Grady made her ﬁrst public performance work, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83), which remains the artist’s best known. Donning white gloves, she performed guerrilla invasions of art spaces, committed to agitating around class issues in the art world, in both white institutions and among fellow Black artists. When speaking about her pièce de résistance O’Grady divulged; “I felt that history would not be kind to me if I turned my back on Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, if I took the easy way out and made acceptable art [...] Once you get inside, there’s this huge temptation to be easy...”O’Grady, however, has never opted for easy, and since the ’90s, her contributions to art history and criticism have proved equally canonical. “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity” (1992/94) is regarded as the ﬁrst article of cultural criticism on the Black female body in western art, and with it O’Grady made one of the strongest arguments against the misuse of the nameless and disempowered to accentuate white womanhood, beauty, and value. “Poison Ivy” (1998) was published in Artforum after the Harvard University panel “Black

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90Like Who?” on stereotypes in contemporary art, in response to the early critiques surrounding the artist Kara Walker.As a thinker who has long explored the artist’s biographical and performance statements as forms for reassessing one’s function and intention, O’Grady has made it difﬁcult to misrepresent her. She has long preferred to orient her live practice as “writing in space” as opposed to performance art, and the praxis she has articulated remains relevant as-ever, 40 years later: I was never able to accommodate to the linearity of writing. Perhaps I’m too conscious of the stages I’ve lived through and the multiple personalities I contain. The fact is, except for the lyric poem, writing is the art form most closely bound to time; but to layer information the way I perceived it, I needed the simultaneity that I could only get in space. […] In its most profound sense, “performance” is a matter of artists shifting dimensions, putting themselves at risk by changing their accustomed relation to space/time. […] I’d like to discover new lands of narrative, lands whose shape I won’t be able to imagine until I get there. If there’s any time left, I’ll try to explore and map the territory.My own percipience was not encouraged or nurtured until my early twenties, the core of my aesthetic concerns and burgeoning critiques of Black visual cultures would go largely ignored until an audience who looked like me, slowly formed. I have since found myself in a continuum of Black women artists who make direct and stealthy efforts not to reinscribe the ideals and thoughts perpetuated by the establishment and society at large. I conceive of O’Grady within such a continuum, one of Jamaican women—like Grace Jones, Adrian Piper, and Louise “Miss Lou” Bennett—who have made evocative, exploratory artworks and staged events using their bodies, voices and other materials to tantalize or provoke a chosen audience, at home and in the diaspora. With varying proximities to the region, the audacity and frankness of

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95At the Wellesley College Archives, we introduce students to the tools and skills needed to analyze primary source materials. Our experiential learning model introduces archival methods that can be applied in many ﬁelds through handling, reading, thinking, discussing, and questioning the collections. Since Wellesley College began acquiring Lorraine O’Grady’s papers in 2010, classes from across the disciplines have learned from them. For example, ﬁrst-year writing students study O’Grady and her role in late twentieth-century feminist protest through an original, signed 1995 publication of Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls. Computer Science students have examined ﬁles related to O’Grady’s early 1990s translation work for CitiBank’s development of the automated teller machine (ATM) to investigate the complexities of emerging technologies. In every class, students—especially those who strule to ﬁnd stories that relate to their own experiences and identities in prevailing historical narratives—can reﬂect on their own important role in the legacy of Wellesley College. O’Grady’s archival collection not only documents her own signiﬁcant contributions to the art world, but, through example, her materials document the breadth of experiences that an alum of color with an Economics major continues to have beyond graduation. Students in Women’s and Gender Studies researched the planning and implementation of Art Is . . . and Mlle Bourgeoise Noire. They debated how “special places” such as museumsTeaching with the Lorraine O’Grady Collection at the Wellesley College Archives Lorraine O’Grady Papers Sara Ludovissy College Archivist, Wellesley College

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98Research Paper Assignment for the Fall 2023 course, WRIT 127: Writing For Change.Learning GoalsIn this essay, you will interpret a work of protest art through visual analysis informed by research. This research paper focuses on some of the most important skills that you will develop at Wellesley: deﬁning a research question, evaluating sources, developing a thesis, structuring an argument, supporting your claims with evidence, distinguishing your voice, and citing sources.Description of the AssignmentIn our ﬁrst unit, we read essays written by radical women of color in the 1970s and 80s who theorized the intersectional nature of their oppression and gave voice to their stories, identities, and resistance. In this unit, we will explore the work of conceptual artist and Wellesley alum Lorraine O’Grady ‘55 as a case study in the art of Black feminist protest. O’Grady’s work, which crosses multiple genres including performance, photography, and cultural criticism, challenges hierar-chical Western binaries. In doing so, O’Grady searches for “the recla-mation of the body as a site of black female subjectivity.” In other words, O’Grady’s work is both social critique and self-expression, changing the way Black women see themselves and are seen by others. Your task will be to choose one of O’Grady’s artworks from the list below, develop a focused research question, and answer this question using the artwork itself and a range of sources. Your complex andLorraine O’Grady and the Art of Protest Erin Battat Lecturer in the Writing Program, Wellesley College

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99arguable answer to your research question will be the thesis that drives your paper. Audience and Purpose The Davis Museum at Wellesley College will be exhibiting Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And during the Spring 2024 semester and her papers are in the College Archives. Imagine your audience as fellow students, museum visitors, and future researchers who seek a deeper under-standing of O’Grady’s work and why it matters. List of TopicsChoose one of the following artworks as the focus of your research. 1. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (performance, 1980-83) 2. Miscegenated Family Album (photo-installation, 1980/94) 3. Art Is . . . (performance, 1983) 4. Body is the Ground of My Experience (black-and-white photo- montages, 1991)Where to Find the Art and SourcesO’Grady’s art, writings, and selected commentaries by others are available on her website, https://lorraineogrady.com/. O’Grady conceived of this website as a digital archive for her conceptual art, which, unlike physical art objects, was often performed live and therefore ephemeral. O’Grady’s website is carefully designed, with images paired with related writings. It is a researcher’s dream! In addition to using the sources on O’Grady’s website, you are required to incorporate into your essay at least two sources that you found somewhere else. You may use other websites and digital sources, but at least one of these additional sources must be a peer-reviewed book or article. We’ll have a class with the art librarian to get you started using library resources.

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103Lorraine O’Grady’s Cutting Out the New York Times brings together snippets of the newspaper from the year 1977. She gives us a glimpse into life in a period that theoretically represents the social progress of the Civil Rights, Black Arts, and Women’s Rights Movements. In this series, O’Grady reﬂects upon her intersecting identities as she questions her role in a rapidly evolving world. In particular, Missing Persons and Finding the One You Love is Loving Yourself highlight the existential nature of change, progress, and maturing. As someone who shares many of O’Grady’s intersecting identities, I read O’Grady’s words as inevitable truths that all Black women go through as we carve out our niche in the world. Though O’Grady was twenty years older than I am now when she created these poems, I ﬁnd myself standing at the same crossroads. I, too, contemplate the repercussions of following my dreams in a society that seems to uplift everyone but me. In Missing Persons, O’Grady asks, “Why has estrogen fallen on hard times” when “every-body should have it so good?” In 1977, she highlighted a discrepancy between herself and the expectations of a prosperous society, which she expanded upon in the subsequent collages. Today, facing a similarly thriving economic market riddled with social inequity, I ask: how responsible is it to be myself? In Finding the One You Love is Loving Yourself, O’Grady seems to overcome her hard times and encourages us to let go of our “nervous habits.” However, she acknowledges the challenges of pursuing her passions, concluding “Dracula is Ready when you are.” This concluding sentiment highlights the oppositional forces—like Dracula—who seek to interrupt O’Grady’s Ready When You Are Deana-Rae Weatherly ‘22 Learning Programs Coordinator, Fuller Craft Museum

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106I had no control of the words that were spread across the pages in different sizes, diagonals, and sequences. I do have control over the visceral feeling. I alone make the meaning that I apply to the words. I visited with each word. I meditatively inhaled and exhaled each of them. My expertise in counseling, higher education, and business all converged at one time. It was an explosion of sorts. I faced “The Danger of Blurring Fact and Fantasy.” The fact is this world is dangerousThe fact is this world is beautifulDangerously BeautifulThe fantasy feeling that my body is safe andwill suffer no repercussions because of the skin I am inHmm...Pause...My heart is palpitating now becauseI just can’t seem to ﬁgure out how to make thisGnawing feeling of impending danger go awayGo away...I like the FantasyI like the carefree feeling, but then I am awakened by the words “Good morning Good afternoon”—and just like that I am back in reality.We exist in this world in a performative way. We “be acting,” and whether you are a willing or unwilling participant, “your move” will determine your life. Fact and Fantasy Patricia Birch Assistant Dean for Intercultural Education, Director of Harambee House, and Advisor for Students of African Descent, Wellesley College

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107Lorraine O’Grady recounts her ﬁve years working as an intelligence ofﬁcer in the late 1950s for the Departments of Labor and State as a time when language “collapsed” for her, when it “melted into a gelatinous pool.” She was reading “10 national and international news- papers a day and—in the lead up to the Cuban Missile Crisis—three complete daily transcripts in Spanish of Cuban radio stations, as well as the endless overnight classiﬁed reports from agents in the ﬁeld.”In 1977, she made Cutting Out The New York Times (CONYT), a series of 26 poems using found newspaper text. Forty years later, she revisited those poems, rearranging the language into what she calls “haiku diptychs” for Cutting Out CONYT.In this time of perpetual connectivity, we receive news and information at a rate faster than we are able to process. The inherently haptic process of cutting clippings from a newspaper signiﬁes a speciﬁc time—I am here—that galvanizes both a presence in our surroundings and a moment of reﬂection on the past. O’Grady describes the format of a diptych as a “conversation that is never-ending.” Each of these instances—mining documents for intelligence information, newspapers for resonant phrases, and reworking her old poems into new poems— I am Here. We Are Here. Kelsey Miller Visiting Lecturer in Art, Wellesley College1. Lorraine O’Grady, “Re: Cutting Out The New York Times, 1977,” Unpublished artist statement, 2006. https://lorraineogrady.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Lorraine-OGrady_re-Cutting-Out-the-New-York-Times_Between-the-Lines.pdf [Accessed September 16, 2023]. 2. Ibid. 3. Lorraine O’Grady, “On Creating a Counter-confessional Poetry,” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973-2019, ed. Aruna D’Souza (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020): 64-66. This essay ﬁrst appeared as Lauren O’Neill-Butler, “Interviews: Lorraine O’Grady,” Artforum, November 19, 2018.

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110This essay was ﬁrst published by the Davis Museum in a gallery guide that accompanied the 1994 exhibition The Body as Measure (September 6-December 18, 1994), which included Miscegenated Family Album, which was then a new work. On October 20, 1994, the Davis hosted the Wellesley College Roundtable, where this essay was delivered as a lecture and O’Grady also spoke.“(My history) is to be a possession for all time rather than an attempt to please popular taste.” Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 1.22“The British say they have saved the Marbles. Well, thank you very much. Now give them back.” Melina Mercouri, Greek Minister of Culture, asking the British government to return the Elgin Marbles to Athens, The London Times, May 22, 1983When Thucydides wrote his famous history of the Peloponnesian Wars, he not only produced a masterful account of the monumental conﬂict between Athens and Sparta at the end of the ﬁfth century B.C.E., he also shaped the way we have come to deﬁne history—as factual, impartial, and objective. Furthermore, disdaining immediate public approval, Thucydides wanted to create “a possession for all time,” and it is precisely this choice of metaphor that has produced our now pervasive view of “history” as an object of value, something that can be owned and appropriated like the famous Elgin marbles that once stood upon the Parthenon. Today’s academic journals and editorial pages, for example, are full of battles over “the stolen legacy” of the ancient Mediterranean—were the Egyptians Black? Have northern The Object of History and the History of Objects (1994) Carol Dougherty Professor of Classical Studies, Wellesley College

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111Europeans suppressed valuable and inﬂuential contributions to intellectual and cultural life made by ancient Egyptians? Did the Greeks borrow from the Egyptians or vice versa? These debates stem in large part from Thucydides’s success in packaging the past as a metaphorical commodity. He has given us the very language to describe history as “mine” or “yours,” as an artifact in danger of being stolen, in need of being defended, demanding to be regained.Lorraine O’Grady also uses valuable—and thus contested—artifacts to explore the relationship between ancient Egypt and contemporary America in her work Miscegenated Family Album. In a series of sixteen diptychs, she matches photographs of twentieth-century African-American women (members of her own family) with published photo-graphs of ancient Egyptian sculpture. Although not an historian, O’Grady reminds us of a very different way of casting the relationship between objects and history. Rather than enshrining history as an artifact that controls interpretation and asserts ownership over what happened, the ancient sculpture opens up a dialogue—a discussion of how history continues to inﬂuence our present experience as well as how contemporary issues and ideological battles determine exactly what we value from the past. The title Sisters (assigned to images 1-4), for example, emphasizes a relationship of equality, reciprocity, and shared experience rather than insisting that chronology determine the nature and direction of cultural inﬂuence. The bust of Nephertiti certainly adds stature and historical context to the 1940s picture of O’Grady’s own sister. Yet the contemporary photograph, remarkable in its similarity in light, pose, and gesture to that of the ancient sculpture, recharges and animates the weighty monument typically forced to represent the signiﬁcance and substance of African culture. The collective impact of the series encourages us to construct a multiplicity of connections between the many sets of images.A generation before Thucydides, Herodotus ﬁrst coined the term “history” to describe his account of the events leading up to and

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112including the Persian Wars. History, as Herodotus invented it, is not a matter of objectivity (although he includes objects in his account— they produce stories). His was a process of enquiry: a histor is an arbitrator, someone who adjudicates competing claims. More important, Herodotus’s approach is noisy. His text preserves a multiplicity of voices, the cacophony of conﬂict, and does not always offer an opinion about who is right. Ever aware of the instability of world affairs, Herodotus’s historiographical method lays contradictory claims side by side, forever open to discussion and debate. In his account of Egypt and its relation to Greek religion and culture, for example, he refuses to choose a Greek or an Egyptian Heracles. Instead, Herodotus makes room for both: “I heard the following story about Heracles—that he was one of the Twelve Gods; but as for the other Heracles, the one the Greeks know about, I was not able to hear a word anywhere in Egypt.” (The Histories, 2.43.1)With a similarly open-ended strategy, O’Grady refuses to freeze the relationship between contemporary African-American women and ancient Egypt within the frame of her work. In this series of paired photographs, the artist juxtaposes past and present, stone and ﬂesh, Africa and America, history and politics, art and life. She then leaves us to assume the authoritative role of histor: to compare, to evaluate, to make connections, to determine the nature of the family ties. Lorraine O’Grady shows that in spite of Thucydides’s masterful attempt, history cannot be reduced to the status of a polished marble statue— a possession for all time. These artifacts will always be part of the picture, but their real value lies not as objects of custody battles for the past. Instead, she suests that we begin to dispossess history of its images of ownership and commodity and begin to value in their place the many stories these artifacts continue to generate—an ongoing and reciprocal dialogue between the past and the present.

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113When I look at Miscegenated Family Album, I see a deeply personal story that breaks down the barriers of thousands of years. I see a glimpse of the love and connections that the artist Lorraine O’Grady feels with her family, juxtaposed in a way that rewrites eurocentric perspectives on a canonical corpus of ancient Egyptian Amarna art. Historically, ancient Egyptian art is divorced from Africa and set into narratives of the Near East and the Western world, using a eurocentric interpretative framework both in scholarly analysis and representation to the public in museum settings. O’Grady uses her perspective of connection to insist that both Nefertiti’s family and her own represent Africa through its history and diaspora. Formal analysis and Egyptol-ogical training task us with dissecting the minute details of ancient faces, contemplating what a lined, older face on Nefertiti could mean within a closely bounded discipline’s system. O’Grady boldly lays out her viewpoint, humanizing Nefertiti’s family in a way that was once completely lost. She reframes the complexities of the historically contentious issue of race in ancient Egypt. Her visual echoes between her family story and Nefertiti’s stand as strong testimony in a politically charged debate, while simultaneously reframing the debate to show how personally meaningful the parameters can be. A Mother’s Kiss (Candace and Devonia/Nefertiti and daughter) collapses around 3320 years into a single shared moment—of lips pressed up against a sweet, sticky, soft baby’s cheek—an undeniably eternal memory. O’Grady’s Album has now been displayed in the same storied halls of museums that hold the ancient Egyptian statues that inspired her: visitors saw them at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in 2018 and at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021. Connecting her contemporaryCollapsing Time, Reframing Debates Elizabeth Minor ‘03 Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology, Wellesley College

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117Lorraine O’Grady chose 16 of the 65 diptychs from her performance Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline to create Miscegenated Family Album (1980/1994), a photographic series that reconciles the unexpected death of her older sister, Devonia. These diptychs juxtapose her family with Queen Nefertiti’s family, including the Egyptian queen’s younger sister, Mutnedjmet. Miscegenated Family Album explores the complex relationship between siblings, but also the range of phenotypes across the African diaspora. In a 1994 presentation at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, O’Grady discussed traveling to Egypt in 1964, two years after Devonia’s death: “[I] found myself surrounded for the ﬁrst time by people who looked like me.”By then, O’Grady, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, had had many experiences, including attending Girls’ Latin School and Wellesley College, working at the Department of Labor, and traveling through Europe. The isolation that students of color face in institutions of higher learning is not new. Our complicated experiences as Black students at Wellesley in the 1970s and 2010s pale in comparison to what O’Grady likely experienced in the 1950s. She has faced and“People Who Looked Like Me”: Finding the Lens of Both/And Joye Bowman ‘74 and Imani Hiinson ‘14 Professor of History and Senior Associate Dean, University of Massachusetts Amherst Senior Project Manager, General Services Administration, United States1. Lorraine O’Grady, “Some Thoughts on Diaspora and Hybridity: An Unpublished Slide Lecture,” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973-2019, ed. Aruna D’Souza (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020): 119-125. This lecture was ﬁrst given at the Wellesley Round Table on October 20, 1994. The faculty symposium was part of the programming for the 1994 exhibition The Body as Measure (September 6-December 18, 1994), which included Miscegenated Family Album. Read the essay on pages 39-46 of this volume.

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118overcome incredible obstacles, including racism, misogyny, and xenophobia throughout her life and careers as a writer, translator, intelligence analyst, professor, and artist. It is thus no coincidence that O’Grady’s entrée into the art ﬁeld was through the lens of institutional critique in her ﬁrst performance as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire in 1980, the same year she performed Nefertiti/ Devonia Evangeline. Just one year before, feminist artist Judy Chicago had completed her installation The Dinner Party, which is now in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum—the very institution where the historic retrospective Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And originated. In her canonical essay “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” O’Grady examines Black female subjectivity in art and notes the erasure of abolitionist Sojourner Truth in The Dinner Party. Through the lens of Both/And, O’Grady’s life and work compel us to question the inﬂuence of hegemonic forces in all areas of society and our own lives, no matter the cost. 1. Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973-2019, ed. Aruna D’Souza (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020): 94-109. This essay was ﬁrst presented at the 1992 College Art Association conference, and edited in 1994. It appeared in Art, Activism, and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage, ed. Grant Kester (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).

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119As a Black curator and art historian who has worked in the museum ﬁeld for ﬁfty years, I react to this performance piece by Lorraine O’Grady on a quite visceral level. The work resonates with me because it recognizes the marginalization of an entire creative community, which has for centuries produced great artists. It simultaneously reminds me of navigational skills constantly required of Black curators in the museum world; we must stay the course, keep focused, and pick our battles. There were certainly moments, however, when it would have felt very satisfying and quite justiﬁed to have released my inner-most anger and frustration at the continued dismissal of Black creative genius because patrons who held power in the artworld assumed that they knew all artists worthy to be included in the ofﬁcial code. The posture of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, emerging from an existence of which most whites had no clue to crash a party resplendent in her white gloved gown, is exquisitely gripping and raw. This performance took guts. Visitors at the New Museum were caught completely off guard, because O’Grady entered the room gracefully like a debutante/hippie bestowing ﬂowers to all—when suddenly and without warning, she pivoted and transformed her performance into a strident and emotional reading of the art world at the highest voltage possible, ending with self-ﬂagellation. This iconic work reminds me of my own Class of 1969, the subject of the book, Rebels in White Gloves: Coming of Age with Hillary’s Class — Wellesley ‘69. Known for our transformative and revolutionary actions at the College, the class was part of a movement that led to lasting Our Voices Are Heard Alvia Wardlaw ‘69 Professor and Director of the University Museum, Texas Southern University

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122The Black and White Show, Lorraine O’Grady’s 1983 exhibition at the Black-owned gallery Kenkeleba Gallery, wove her interdisciplinary artistic practice into the role of a curator by presenting works by a diverse group of artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Adrian Piper, and Keith Haring. O’Grady disregards the binary of artist/curator and black/white to produce a conceptual work that counters the art world’s de-facto segregation. Forty years after The Black and White Show, I see parallels between the postmodernist artistic landscape of the 1980s and the current gallery scene of New York. As a gallery assistant, I frequent the openings of Lower East Side and other Downtown galleries, and seldom do I see more than ten Black people. Galleries frequently push Black artists’ work into boxes that implicitly—or explicitly—advertise a “Black show.” The Black artist receives praise on works based on representation, disenfranchisement, and historical lineages, but is siloed and silenced when the avant-garde is invoked. In weaving together this exhibition, O’Grady cemented herself as a seer, building new paradigms and deconstructing artistic boundaries in ways that remain relevant today.Curating as Conceptual Art Iris Simone Haastrup-Sanders ‘22 Gallery Assistant, Jack Shainman Gallery

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124Since 2012, I have witnessed Lorraine O’Grady ‘55 engage with students, faculty, artists, and scholars in a range of events: from our ﬁrst humble Google hangout as a guest speaker in my seminar, The Body: Race and Gender in Contemporary Art in 2013 to gathering my class and other visitors to discuss her groundbreaking contributions at the Wellesley College Archives in 2018 to dancing with me, current students, and alums in Venice at the Loophole of Retreat to honor Simone Leigh. I ﬁrst saw O’Grady’s Art Is . . ., her seminal suite of photographs of the African American Day Parade in Harlem from 1984 in the exhibition, This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston in 2013. The exhibition’s location matters because when an important exhibition takes place in the Boston area, I can more easily navigate getting my classes to see the work in person–a critical aspect of teaching art history from art directly. Secondly, whenever O’Grady’s work is on view in Boston, it’s a homecoming, both as a born and raised Bostonian and as a Wellesley College alumna. Teaching What “Art Is” at Wellesley College with Lorraine O’Grady ‘55 Nikki A. Greene Associate Professor of Art, Wellesley College 1. Organized by Helen Molesworth when she was the Barbara Lee Chief Curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (February 11, 2012-June 3, 2012), and was on view at the ICA from November 15, 2012 until March 3, 2013. O’Grady delivered the lecture, “My 1980s,” found on pages 47-58, as part of the programming for the exhibition in Chicago.

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125When I served as a consultant for the exhibition Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, curator Nathaniel Silver asked about leads on how to incorporate aspects of the Black community in Boston during the early twentieth century. I immediately thought of O’Grady and the documentation of her family’s immigration from Jamaica and integration into the Boston community. That simple introduction led not only to O’Grady’s personal essay in the Boston’s Apollo catalogue, but also to the installation of The Strange Taxi, Stretched on the Gardner Museum’s facade in January 2020. The work features her mother and three aunts ﬂoating conﬁdently above a set of brownstones, thriving despite the challenges they faced living in a post-World War I Boston. The seminar students who attended the opening of Boston’s Apollo in February 2020 stood proudly next to O’Grady and President Johnson to take photographs; they held their heads high as Wellesley students. Those students then, now, and for generations to come, feel pride when learning about O’Grady’s biography of resilience and the display of her brilliance in her writings and on gallery walls throughout the world. 2. Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent was on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum from February 13 until October 12, 2020.

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128Art Is . . . , which took place in September of 1983, responded to a comment that “avant-garde art doesn’t have anything to do with black people.” As a result, Lorraine O’Grady deﬁantly crafted an avant-garde performance for the African-American Day Parade in Harlem, an important cultural event for New York’s Black community. Dancers and actors dressed in white strutted the streets of Harlem carrying golden frames. During the parade, the performers placed the frames around the crowd’s faces: making them art.I ﬁrst saw photographs from O’Grady’s performance Art Is . . . at the Perez Art Museum when I was a junior in high school. I realized that the artist wanted to place the parade spectators as the focal point of the artwork. Art Is . . . transformed the way that I see and interpret art. I realized that to me, community is what art is truly about. People give art meaning. Art Is . . . was the reason why I came to Wellesley. I knew that O’Grady had gone to Wellesley, and I thought that if someone who had created such a meaningful piece of art went there, I had to go to that college too.Make Me Art! Regina Gallardo ‘23 Community and Family Engagement Coordinator, Boston Children’s Museum1. Lorraine O’Grady, “Art Is . . . Summary,” undated. https://lorraineogrady.com/art/art-is/. [Accessed September 17, 2023].

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130I saw Lorraine O’Grady’s Art Is . . . (1983/2009) exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston in 2022. Created during what she has described as her “Duchamp years,” Art Is . . . shattered the borderlines of art for me. From an art historical perspective, Art Is . . . capsizes the white-dominated avant-garde art world by centering Black performers in Harlem’s African American Day Parade. O’Grady’s challenge to white hegemony lays special emphasis on the agency of artists. From O’Grady, I learned that Art Is . . . not just about the artwork. While the paraders shout to O’Grady, “Frame Me! Make ME art!”, Art Is . . . the artist’s pursuit of empowerment. O’Grady calls for a power-balanced art world that celebrates the BIPOC community not only as subjects of art, but also as artists.As a longtime student and teacher of surrealism, O’Grady turns the parade from the subject of art into a group of conscious artists through an artistic impartation, whereby each parader choreographs their own vibrancy that transcends the frame of art. In Simone Leigh and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s ﬁlm Conspiracy (2022), O’Grady acts as the audience of the burning efﬁgy, which deﬁes the traditional concept of a static and indestructible sculpture with the ﬁre. By gazing at the transformative and regenerative ﬁre, O’Grady reveals that Art Is . . . artists supporting artists, as she did quietly in Art Is . . . behind the frame.Behind and Beyond the Frame Chuxin Zhang ‘24 Art History and Philosophy Major and 2022 Davis Museum Summer Intern, Wellesley College

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132Lorraine O’Grady completed Body is the Ground of My Experience, photomontages exhibited in her ﬁrst one-person exhibit at the INTAR Gallery in New York City, when I began my ﬁrst year at Wellesley College: 1991. As a student of African and Southeast Asian descent whose native home is Trinidad and Tobago, I was able to ground my body at Wellesley through celebrating the Yoruba deities of Haiti and Brazil in the drum and dance ensemble Yanvalou. Exploring spirit and movement evolved into a dedicated yoga practice. Thirty years after I ﬁrst arrived at Wellesley as an undergraduate, I returned to campus as a yoga instructor. Today, students in my Yoga for Stress Relief classes experience ways to ground their bodies through breath, move- ment, and visual tools. O’Grady’s Body is the Ground of My Experience offers yoga students the opportunity to reﬂect on how images can be composed in class to create an internal landscape and then used to externally express a union of the multiple layers of their existence. Inspired by Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And while it is on view at the Davis, each student in my Spring 2024 classes will create a card that pairs an image with text. These Both/And messages will reﬂect each student’s expression of inner union, compassion, and self-love that celebrates and nourishes their unique lived experience. My Body, My Ground, and My Experience at Wellesley Rhonda Gray ‘95 Professor of English, Roxbury Community College and Instructor in Physical Education, Recreation and Athletics, Wellesley College

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133Lorraine O’Grady’s Both/And conjures up an African consciousness and eco-cosmological sensibility grounded in the layers and conﬂuence of body, memory, experience, and nature: the dynamic interplay of God-energy. God is neither male nor female but, rather, both/and. Through her art and art making, O’Grady embodies Black pedagogy and Blackness: a breathing testament to Black cultural activist Val Gray Ward’s assertion that “Black Art is Black Life.” Unlike Western views on art, there is no such thing as “art for art’s sake” within the Black African aesthetic. Art is spiritually linked to the lived experience of the artist. Spirit and matter are inseparable. There is no dichotomy between creation and the Creator. When we create, we venerate our God-self. My course AFR/EDUC 205.01: Black Pedagogies in the Americas explores the ingenious ways that free, enslaved, disenfranchised, and emancipated Black Africans across time in the Americas have tapped into their embodied wisdoms and eco-centered cosmologies to create, afﬁrm, and preserve self and community, especially in situations of hostility. The exhibition Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And bares a revelatory, redemptive, and emancipatory sense of being, belonging, and becoming whole in a world that has been fractured by the Embodying Black Pedagogies: When We Create, We Venerate Our God-self: Liseli A. Fitzpatrick Lecturer in Africana Studies, Wellesley College 1. “Black Art is Black Life” is the second of the Kuumba Principles of Black art, which Ward published in 1972 in the ﬁrst issue of the Kuumba Theatre’s newsletter, Kuumba News. The Kuumba Theatre Company Records are held by the Chicago Public Library. See https://www.chipublib.org/fa-kuumba-theatre-company-records/. Issues of Kuumba News are in Series 2: Administrative Files, 1969-1993, undated; Subseries A: Operational Files, 1969-1993, undated; Box 12, Folder 18.

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134brutalities of slavery, colonialism, capitalism, and Western delusions of “white supremacy.” In the class, we embrace O’Grady’s entire body as/of art and pedagogy. Her photomontage series Body Is the Ground of My Experience (1991) renounces violent Western impositions onto one’s own body of consciousness, imagination, and reality. Born and raised in Roxbury, Boston to Jamaican parents, O’Grady draws together her Caribbean heritage and upbringing within a New England landscape in The Fir-Palm (1991/2019). The West Indian palm burgeoning from the umbilicus of a Black female body unearths the centrality of the Divine Feminine principle, signaling that all life is born of womb, darkness, and land. The image uncovers the nature, treatment, and desecration of Black womanhood through voluntary and involuntary migrations, and miscegenation. Black pedagogies, grounded in Both/And, unearth and address the sacrilege caused by European colonizers and their progeny in the discordant construction of the West, through the violent enslavement, objectiﬁcation, and displacement of Black and Brown bodies. Fundamentally, the resiliency, creative intelligence, and ingenuity of the Black African spirit, as seen through Lorraine O’Grady’s body as/of art and experience, enable us to conceive self and community in the face of depraved violence, anti-Blackness, and miseducation.

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138Lorraine O’Grady imagines Jeanne’s words for us, giving prose to voicelessness. Giving us more than mouths and bellies and “raucous gesticulating.” A two-dimensional ink sketch, sensual and coy. Baudelaire’s gaze telling Jeanne’s story. She is O’Grady’s ﬁgurative “hybrid woman.” Diasporic. Disoriented. Navigating worlds. My Mexican mother married & moved to the Midwest with my father. I grew up disoriented in rural Ohio and longed for blue eyes like Dad’s. A half-breed some sneered. Their gaze pushed mine towards the shadows, chilled my desire to be heard. It took so long, but now: I swallow the sun, absorb it in my brown skin, and deepen its color. I orient myself. Relish in messiness. Thankful for our voices.I Swallow the Sun and Speak Shannon O’Brien Director of Editorial and Social Media, Wellesley College

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140Lorraine O’Grady’s Persistent tells a tale of gentriﬁcation and queer rights. As a Cinema and Media Studies major, I believe that audiences give conceptual art meaning through engaging with it. In this installation, the ghost of a once lively club is represented through pink-lined windows and videos of dancers against a black background projected on a wall. The viewer can peer into these windows to witness diverse clubgoers enjoying house-like beats. Coming from Texas, I know San Antonio to be the party hub of the state, so it is intriguing that one club attracted the “wrong” crowd, a “wrong” group. In 2007, the closing of Davenport Lounge coincided with debates surrounding LGBT rights in United States and global legislatures. At the forefront of historic LGBT movements, Black and Brown people faced inter-sectional discrimination and established the sanctuary of underground scenes, like the dance club depicted by O’Grady. These communities relied on such spaces to freely explore their cultural and queer identities. As a viewer of Persistent, nose pressed against the window, one must consider the perspectives of those in this multi-ethnic crowd and those who looked down on them: those who were for them and those who were against them. BibliographyLoophole of Retreat: Venice. “Lorraine O’Grady and Simon Leigh in Conversation, Loophole of Retreat: Venice.” YouTube, Jan 13, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGrlp-HRp54Mitter, Siddhartha. “Lorraine O’Grady, Still Cutting into the Culture.” The New York Times, February 19, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/arts/design/lorraine-ogrady-brooklyn-museum-retrospective.htmlLooking into Queer Histories Shaela Sageth ‘26 Cinema and Media Studies Major and Davis Museum Student Curatorial Research Assistant, Wellesley College

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144The reproduction of a lost, cherished place, Persistent becomes a heterotopia rebuilt with light. Persistent immerses you in a palimpsest: smell, touch, and taste erased, sight and sound rewritten. Epitaphic, Persistent illustrates “memory as an event pulled out of darkness.”With ﬂesh and bone locked away in yesterday, we are alone with the anxieties that evicted them. We look, look, look, and ﬁnd that ghosts don’t tire, they aren’t sore, and the dance that they carry on is no longer at our mercy. I suspect only the beats welcome our sympathy as they dash across no-dance-land, to and from burning wall-ghosts—or are those funeral pyres?Without bodies to rest on, the beats ﬂy like Shel Silverstein’s haunting Gooloo bird, never-landing. They spend their lives remembering, mid-dash: how each time they ran into skin they found home.Flying Beats, Dancing Memories Kelly Song ‘24 Comparative Literary Studies Major and Davis Museum Student Tour Guide, Wellesley College 1. Anne Carson, “III. Epitaphs,” Economy of the Unlost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002): 85.2. Shel Silverstein, “Gooloo,” A Light in the Attic (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1981): 114.

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146Further ReadingMitter, Siddhartha. “Lorraine O’Grady, Still Cutting Into the Culture,” New York Times, February 19, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/arts/design/lorraine-ogrady-brooklyn-museum-retrospective.html [Accessed June 7, 2023] This article begins with a reference to O’Grady’s 25th class reunion at Wellesley, which she missed. Instead, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire made her debut at the Just Above Midtown Gallery. Morris, Catherine and Aruna D’Souza, eds. Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And. Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum and Dancing Foxes Press, 2021 O’Grady, Lorraine. Writing in Space, 1973-2019, ed. Aruna D’Souza. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020 O’Grady, Lorraine and Simone Leigh. Lorraine O’Grady and Simone Leigh in conversation, Loophole of Retreat: Venice. A conversation between Lorraine O’Grady and Simone Leigh at Loophole of Retreat: Venice, a symposium held from Oct 7-9, 2022 at the Fondazione Cini in Venice, Italy, in conjunction with Simone Leigh: Sovereignty, the artist’s exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion as part of the 59th Biennale di Venezia. https://youtu.be/KGrlp-HRp54 [Accessed June 7, 2023] Sparling Williams, Stephanie. Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Language. Berkeley: University of California Press: 2022 St. Félix, Doreen. “Lorraine O’Grady Has Always Been a Rebel,” The New Yorker, September 29, 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-inter-view/lorraine-ogrady-has-always-been-a-rebel [Accessed June 7, 2023] Whyte, Murray. “Lorraine O’Grady Outpaced the Culture for Years. In Brooklyn, It Finally Catches Up,” Boston Globe, March 17, 2021. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/03/17/arts/lorraine-ogrady-outpaced-culture-years-brooklyn-it-ﬁnal-ly-catches-up/ [Accessed June 7, 2023] Current Wellesley faculty, staff, and students can access this article through ProQuest.

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147Lorraine O’Grady: Both/AndFebruary 8 - June 2, 2024Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is the ﬁrst major career survey of the renowned conceptual artist and cultural critic whose work has challenged prevailing understandings around gender, race, and class for over four decades. The exhibition charts the development of O’Grady’s artistic oeuvre, which spans collage, photo-installation, performance, video, and text. 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; colonialism and slavery; hybridity and diasporic experience; multiplicity and selfhood; and intersectional feminist theory and praxis. For O’Grady, the diptych form, by forcing sustained conversation, can hold tellingly chosen dissimilars still long enough to become familiar. In deploying the diptych as both artistic and conceptual strategy, O’Grady has achieved a transformational anti-hierarchical approach to difference. Over the course of her practice, she has refused the possibility of neat resolution and remained committed to keeping contradictions in play so as to undermine the power dynamics baked into the binary oppositions of self and other, male and female, West and non-West, black and white, and past and present.Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is organized by Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, and writer Aruna D’Souza with Jenee-Daria Strand, Former Curatorial Associate, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. Leadership support for this exhibition is provided by Organized for the Davis Museum by Amanda Gilvin, Sonja Novak Koerner ‘51 Senior Curator of Collections and Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs, the exhibition is presented at the Davis with generous support from the Mildred Cooper Glimcher ‘61 Endowed Fund, the Anonymous ‘70 Endowed Museum Program Fund, Wellesley College Friends of Art at the Davis, and the Alice G. Spink Art Fund.

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148AcknowledgementsLorraine O’Grady would like to thank the following: Chappelle Freeman Jr., Edward Bowden Allen, Ellen Rosen, Richard DeGussi-Bogutski, Coreen Simpson, Salimah Ali, Eileen Harris Norton, Just Above Midtown (JAM), Linda Goode Bryant, Anne Fucci Criscitiello, Freda Leinwand, Gylbert Coker, Horace Brockington, Jennifer Manfredi, Ellen Sragow, Emily Velde, Bern 1905, Noah Jemisin, Lorenzo Pace, Beverly Trachtenberg, Bill O’Connor, Francine Berman, Steven Overman (Eastman Kodak Company), Marlon Ziello (Ziello Inc.), Corinne Jennings, Joe Overstreet, George Mingo, Keith Haring, New York State Council on the Arts, Whitﬁeld Lovell, Robert Ransick, Lilith Dove, Nahna Kim, Shamus Clisset (Laumont Photographics ), Willie Vera (Laumont Photographics), the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons, David Cabrera and Alexander Gray, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Theo Davis, Courtney R. Baker, Irene Cheng, Adrienne Caldwell, Anonymous Was A Woman, Winslow Hinds, Carlo Montagnino, Tavis Delahunt (NB Technologies), Habby Osk, Carmen von Kende, Carolyn Tennant, Andil Gosine, Sur Rodney (Sur), Kyla McMillan, Ursula Davila-Villa, Brian Guerin, Kelly Spivey and Bill Seery (Mercer Media), Maria Elena Venuto (The Standby Program), Jason Crump (Metropolis Post), Art Matters, United States Artists, René Schmitt’s Druckgraphik, Stephanie Sparling Williams, Stacy A. Scibelli, Laura Lappi, Creative Capital, Jeff Wasson (Wasson Artistry), Matt White, John Umphlett, Miles Templeton, Scott Wilson (Darkwood Armory), Peter Johnsson (Albion Swords Ltd., LLC ), Mike Sigman (Albion Swords Ltd., LLC), Kerry Gaertner Gerbracht, Loretta Polk, Aruna D’Souza, Anne Pasternak (Brooklyn Museum), Catherine J. Morris (Brooklyn Museum), Audrey Walen (Brooklyn Museum), Page Benkowski (Alexander Gray Associates), Ken Wissoker (Duke University Press), Michael McCullough (Duke University Press), Laura Sell (Duke University Press), Karen Kelly (Dancing Foxes Press), Barbara Schroeder (Dancing Foxes Press), Alice Chung (Omnivore, Inc.), Jacqueline Francis (Wattis Institute), Jeanne Gerrity (Wattis Institute), Kim Nguyen (Wattis Institute), Zoe Leonard, Adam Pendleton, Adrienne Edwards, Rujeko Hockley, Anne Byrd, Connie Butler, Legacy Russell, Thomas Lax, Deana Haag, Christine Kuan, James Schamus, Rachida Bumbray, Simone Leigh, Tina Campt, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Loophole of Retreat: Venice, Sandra Payne, Patricia Spears Jones, Anna Stothart, Miranda Samuels, Josie Roland Hodson, Nick Mauss, Jarrett Earnest, Holland Cotter, Siddhartha Mitter, David Velasco, Catherine Damman, Mira Dayal, Doreen St. Félix, Zawe Ashton, Diane Henry Lepart, Rianna Jade Parker, Sam Vernon, Moko Fukuyama, Haoyan of America, Richard Nathaniel (DJ Vinyl Richie), Paul and Carole Thompson, Emma McKee, Mariane Ibrahim, Tina Bridgeport, Norman Polk, Ellen Martin Story, Candace Allen, Kimberly Allen-King, Guy D. and Annette Olbert Jones, Ciara Casey Mendes, Kristin Emily Jones, Devon April Jones, Kevin Elijah Mendes, Royce Marco Mendes, Marlia Snow Elgeziry, Rixi Coral Elgeziry, Limon, Furby, and Rocinante.Amanda Gilvin would like to thank Lorraine O’Grady for proposing this project, and for the depth and breadth of her artistic practice that the book explores. This project builds on the remarkable curatorial successes of Catherine Morris and Aruna D’Souza, and I feel fortunate that we were able to bring the exhibition from the Brooklyn Museum to the Davis. Olivia Gregory and Gwen Arriaga attended to countless details to ensure the exhibitions success at the Davis. I am grateful to Page Benkowski (Alexander Grey Associates) whose early support

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149enabled this project to get off the ground. Thanks to Mariane Ibrahim, Emma McKee, and Jenna Washington (Mariane Ibrahim Gallery) for their enthusiastic support for this book. Ursula Davila-Villa, Anna Stothart, and Brian Guerin (Lorraine O’Grady Studio) each provided crucial contributions to the project, and I thank them. I am also thankful to Duke University Press, Tate Modern, Lauren O’Neill-Butler, MIT Press, Rianna Jade Parker, and Carol Dougherty, who agreed to the republication of essays and videos in the volume. I am incredibly grateful to Alicia Bruce (Davis Museum Friends of Art Curatorial Project Manager and Researcher), who supported the project management of the e-book and designed it. This e-book would not have been possible without the support and editorial work of Lisa Fischman (Davis Museum Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 Director). Special thanks to Sarina Khan-Reddy (Media Specialist), for her work on making sure this e-book is online for you to read. Many thanks to the authors in Section 3, who are Wellesley faculty, staff, students, and alumnae who began teaching and learning with Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And well before the exhibition’s doors opened. Some of them have taught and learned at the Davis for years, and because of the 2020-2021 pandemic-related closures and the 2023 construction closure, others have eagerly awaited our reopening with curiosity about galleries unfamiliar to them. I am especially thankful for the close collaboration with professor Nikki A. Greene, who has taught and learned with O’Grady for many years, and who is teaching a seminar focused on O’Grady’s work in Spring 2024. I also owe particular thanks to College Archivist Sara Ludovissy, who has graciously facilitated the numerous archival loans to the exhibition and participated in many planning meetings. Many thanks to Senior Director of Gift Planning Debra DeVaughn ‘74 for her contributions to all Lorraine O’Grady projects at Wellesley.The Davis offers special thanks the Davis staff members who have brought this presentation of Both/And to fruition at Wellesley: Mark Beeman (Manager of Exhibitions and Collections Preparation)Alicia Bruce ( Davis Museum Friends of Art Curatorial Project Manager and Researcher)Helen Connor (Assistant Registrar for Exhibitions & Digital Resources)Sarina Khan-Reddy (Media Specialist)Shannon Nelson (Ofﬁce Manager) Jessica Orzulak (Linda Wyatt Gruber 66’ Curatorial Fellow in Photography)Ann Penman (Manager of Museum Security and Visitor Experience) Semente (Curator of Education and Public Programs)Mary Beth Timm (Associate Director for Operations and Collections Management)The Davis is working closely with partners on- and off-campus on both the exhibition and an ambitious slate of programming. Special thanks to the Ofﬁce of the President, Communications and Public Affairs, the Development Ofﬁce, and Teak Media. Exhibition programming includes Taking the White Gloves Off: A Performance Art Series in Honor of Lorraine O’Grady ‘55, curated by Nikki A. Greene, Associate Professor of Art. For this, we are grateful for the generous support from the Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities, Wellesley College’s Committee on Lectures and Cultural Events, the Art Department, and the Ofﬁce of the Provost. The series is made possible in part through the support and partnership of the Colby College

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151A vital resource for communities on the Wellesley College campus and beyond, the Davis Museum is one of the oldest and most acclaimed academic ﬁne art museums in the United States. Its signature Rafael Moneo building houses collections that span the global history of art, from antiquity to the present. Guided by commitments to diversity and inclusion, excellence and innovation, and access for all, the Davis is at the core of Wellesley’s liberal arts mission of educating women to make a difference in the world. With exceptional encyclopedic holdings, rotating special exhibitions, and enriching public programs, the Davis warmly welcomes visitors of all ages. The Davis Museum at Wellesley College is located on the ancestral and unceded tribal lands of the Massachusett people. We acknowledge the continuing presence of the Massachusett, and their relatives and neighbors, the Wampanoag and Nipmuc peoples, and pay respect to Indigenous elders past and present.