WELLESLEY, MA.- Lorraine O’Grady ‘55, a critically acclaimed contemporary artist and cultural critic, returns to the Boston area with her retrospective exhibition Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And. This landmark exhibition will coincide with a performance art series, both of which are free and open to the public. Both/And is starting at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College from February 8 to June 2, 2024.

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is the first major career survey of the renowned conceptual artist whose work has long challenged prevailing understandings around gender, race, and class. Originally organized by the Brooklyn Museum in March 2021, the exhibition charts the development of O’Grady’s artistic oeuvre, which spans collage, photo-installation, performance, and video. 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; hybridity and diasporic experience; multiplicity and selfhood; colonialism and slavery; and intersectional feminist theory and praxis. Through her deployment of the diptych as both an artistic and conceptual strategy, O’Grady calls for an anti-hierarchical approach to difference within the categories of Black and white, self, and other, West and non-West, and past and present. Through spring, the Davis Museum will offer an opportunity for visitors to experience O’Grady’s work and to participate in free public programs. Taking the White Gloves Off: A Performance Art Series in Honor of Lorraine O’Grady ‘55 premieres on February 8, in collaboration with the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College Museum of Art. Details are forthcoming.

“This is an extraordinary opportunity for us to open the Davis Museum and welcome Lorraine O’Grady back to campus with her triumphant exhibition, Both/And,” said Dr. Lisa Fischman, the Ruth Gordon Shapiro ‘37 Director of the Davis Museum. “Her bold artistic practice is stunning visually and conceptually and has been for decades. It’s no surprise that she is especially appealing to younger audiences on today’s cultural landscape and inspires them with her critical perspectives on race, femininity, inequity, and identity.”

As a Black woman, a native New Englander and child of Caribbean parents, O’Grady has made art as a means of self-exploration as well as cultural critique. Born in Boston to Jamaican parents, she was educated at the Girls Latin School before studying economics and Spanish literature at Wellesley College (class of 1955). O’Grady became the first Wellesley graduate to pass the U.S. Federal Management intern exam, after which she received a coveted job at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Turning to artmaking in the 1970s, she first exhibited her work at Wellesley in 1994 as part of the Body as Measure exhibition. The Davis Museum acquired her “Sisters” quadriptych from that show.

Among the works created by O’Grady between 1977 and 2021 that will be on view at the Davis Museum are her photo-installation of Rivers, First Draft, a one-time only performance that she staged in New York’s Central Park in 1982, featuring multiple overlapping narratives, and her performance Art Is…, a joyful intervention into Harlem’s 1983 African-American Day Parade, that engaged with both avant-garde ideas and conceptual art. The exhibition also includes pieces from O’Grady’s more recent (2020) body of work, revolving around the artist’s latest artistic persona known as the Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel. The Knight wears a 40-pound suit of custom-forged, plated steel armor in the Late Renaissance style of the conquistadors but topped with Caribbean headdresses emblematic of the Global South. The New York Times referenced the works in a laudatory February 2021 “Sunday Arts” cover story of O’Grady, noting “Gradually, the art world has inscribed O’Grady into the canon.”

In 2010, O’Grady donated her paper archives to the Wellesley College Library. Her work was featured in the Davis Museum’s 2012 exhibition, A Generous Medium: Photography at Wellesley, 1972–2012 and, in 2017, she was honored with the Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award.

During the exhibition of Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And, faculty, staff, and students from across the Wellesley campus will be studying and discussing the works in several departments including Africana Studies, American Studies, Anthropology, Art, Cinema and Media Studies, Classical Studies, English, History, Philosophy, Physical Education, Recreation and Athletics, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Writing. A major symposium is planned for February 9, 2024, with details to come.