Writing in Space, 1973–2019

Lorraine O'Grady is an artist whose work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the world, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, and the Palais de Tokyo. Her art can be seen in numerous public collections throughout the United States and Europe. A major retrospective of her work, Both/And, opens at the Brooklyn Museum in November 2020. Aruna D'Souza is an art critic, curator, and author, most recently of Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts.

List of Illustrations  ix
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction: For Those Who Will Know / Aruna D'Souza  xix
1. Statements and Performance Transcripts
Two Biographical Statements (2012 and 2019)  1
Cutting Out the New York Times (CONYT), 1977 (2006)  6
Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 1955 (1981)  8
Rivers, First Draft, 1982: Working Script, Cast List, Production Credits (1982)  11
Statement for Moira Roth re: Art Is . . ., 1983 (2007)  23
Body Is the Ground of My Experience, 1991: Image Descriptions (2010)  27
Studies for a Sixteen-Diptych Installation to Be Called Flowers of Evil and Good, 1995–Present (1998)  30
2. Writing in Space
Performance Statement #1: Thoughts about Myself, When Seen as a Political Performance Artist (181)  37
Performance Statement #2: Why Judson Memorial? or, Thoughts about the Spiritual Attitudes of My Work (1982)  40
Performance Statement #3: Thinking Out Loud: About Performance Art and My Place in It (1983)  43
Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline (1977) 50
Interview with Cecilia Alemani: Living Symbols of New Epochs (2010)  53
Interview with Amanda Hunt on Art Is . . .  (2015)  60
On Creating a Counter-confessional Poetry (2018)  64
3. Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity
Black Dreams (1982)  69
Interview with Linda Montano (1986)  77
Dada Meets Mama: Lorraine O'Grady on WAC (1992)  84
The Cave: Lorraine O'Grady on Black Women Film Directors (1992) 88
Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity (1992/1994)  94
Mlle Bourgeoise Noire and Feminism (2007)  110
4. Hybridity, Diaspora, and Thinking Both/And
On Being the Presence That Signals an Absence (1993)  115
Some Thoughts on Diaspora and Hybridity: An Unpublished Slide Lecture (1994)  119
Flannery and Other Regions (1999)  126
Responding Politicially to William Kentridge (2002)  131
Sketchy Thoughts on My Attraction to the Surrealists (2013)  136
Two Exhibits: The Diptych vs. the Triptych (1998) and Notes on the Diptych (2018)  139
Introducing: Lorraine O'Grady and Juliana Huxtable (2016)  142
5. Other Art Worlds
A Day at the Races: Lorraine O'Grady on Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Black Art World (1993)  169
SWM: On Sean Landers (1994)  176
Poison Ivy (1998)  181
The Black and White Show, 1982 (2009)  184
Email Q&A with Artforum Editor (2009)  198
My 1980s (2012)  203
Rivers and Just Above Midtown (2013, 2015)  213
6. Retrospectives
Interview with Laura Cottingham (1995)  219
Interview with Jarrett Earnest (2016)  239
The Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Project, 1980–1983 (2018)  250
Job History (from a Feminist "Retrospective") (2004)  260
First There Is a Mountain, Then There Is No Mountain, Then . . . ? (1973)  269
The Wailers and Bruce Springsteen at Max's Kansas City, July 18 1973 (1973)  278
Notes  287
Index  311
Credits