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Artist Talk: Lorraine O’Grady

Lorraine O’Grady, The First and the Last of the Modernists Diptych 1 Red (Charles and Michael), 2010. Fujiflex print. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © 2015 Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Lecture M. Victor Leventritt

Harvard Art Museums
32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA

This lecture is offered in conjunction with UNESCO’s International Year of Light.

In connection with her exhibition, Lorraine O’Grady: Where Margins Become Centers, on view from October 29, 2015 through January 10, 2016 at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the artist will discuss her rich and critically engaged practice.

O’Grady’s installations, performances, and texts address issues of diaspora, hybridity, and black female subjectivity. The New York Times has called her “one of the most interesting American conceptual artists around.” Her landmark performance Mlle Bourgeoise Noire was an entry point into WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 2007), the first-ever museum exhibition of this major art movement.

O’Grady’s work has recently been exhibited at MoMA PS1, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and is represented not only in the Harvard Art Museums collections but also in the collections of MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, LACMA, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among many others.

The lecture is cosponsored by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

This event will take place in Menschel Hall, Lower Level.

Free admission. Please enter the museums via the entrance on Broadway.

Complimentary parking available in the Broadway Garage, 7 Felton Street, Cambridge.

Support for the lecture is provided by the M. Victor Leventritt Fund, which was established through the generosity of the wife, children, and friends of the late M. Victor Leventritt, Harvard Class of 1935. The purpose of the fund is to present outstanding scholars of the history and theory of art to the Harvard and Greater Boston communities. Support for this program is also provided by the Richard L. Menschel Endowment Fund. Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.