Director and Editor: Theodore Timreck
Interviewer Terry Stoller
Cameraperson and Lighting: Ethan Mass
Narration: Sandra Kingsbury

Photo: Lelani Foster 2021. (Click image to enlarge poster)

“Lorraine O’Grady (1934 – 2024) was 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 challenged artistic and cultural conventions through her incisive critique of the binary logic inherent in Western thought. She 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 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 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 shaped the theoretical contours of a body of work that has been groundbreaking in its charting of the emergence of Black subjectivity in both artistic modernism and Western modernity as a whole.”

– An excerpt from the Lorraine O’Grady website