Writing in Space, 1973-2019 gathers the writings of conceptual artist Lorraine O'Grady, who for over forty years has investigated the complicated relationship between text and image. A firsthand account of O'Grady's wide-ranging practice, this volume contains statements, scripts, and previously unpublished notes charting the development of her performance work and conceptual photography; her art and music criticism that appeared in the Village Voice and Artforum; critical and theoretical essays on art and culture, including her classic "Olympia's Maid"; and interviews in which O'Grady maps, expands, and complicates the intellectual terrain of her work. She examines issues ranging from black female subjectivity to diaspora and race and representation in contemporary art, exploring both their personal and their institutional implications. O'Grady's writings—introduced in this collection by critic and curator Aruna D'Souza—offer a unique window into her artistic and intellectual evolution while consistently plumbing the political possibilities of art.

Speaking Out of Turn is the first monograph dedicated to the forty-year oeuvre of feminist conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady. Examining O’Grady’s use of language, both written and spoken, Stephanie Sparling Williams charts the artist’s strategic use of direct address—the dialectic posture her art takes in relationship to its viewers—to trouble the field of vision and claim a voice in the late 1970s through the 1990s, when her voice was seen as “out of turn” in the art world. Speaking Out of Turn situates O’Grady’s significant contributions within the history of American conceptualism and performance art while also attending to the work’s heightened visibility in the contemporary moment, revealing both the marginalization of O’Grady in the past and an urgent need to revisit her art in the present.

In Artist, Audience, Accomplice, Sydney Stutterheim introduces a new figure into the history of performance art and related practices of the 1970s and 1980s: the accomplice. Occupying roles including eyewitness, romantic partner, studio assistant, and documenter, this figure is situated between the conventional subject positions of the artist and the audience. The unseen and largely unacknowledged contributions of such accomplices exceed those performed by a typical audience because they share in the responsibility for producing artworks that entail potential ethical or legal transgressions. Stutterheim analyzes the art of Chris Burden, Hannah Wilke, Martin Kippenberger, and Lorraine O’Grady, showing how each cannily developed strategies of shared culpability that evoked questions about the accomplice’s various rights and roles. In this way, Stutterheim argues that the artist’s authority is not sovereign, total, or exclusive but, rather, fluid and relational. By examining the development of an alternative model of participatory art that relies on a network of accomplices, Stutterheim radically revises current understandings of artistic agency, aesthetic property, and acknowledged authorship.

Radical Intimacy in Contemporary Art focuses on practices that operate at the edges of sexuality and its socially sanctioned expressions. Using psychoanalysis and object-oriented feminism, Keren Moscovitch focuses on the work of several contemporary, provocative artists to initiate a dialogue on the role of intimacy in challenging and reimagining ideology. Moscovitch suggests that intimacy has played an under-appreciated role in the shifting of social and political consciousness. She explores the work of Leigh Ledare, Genesis P-Orridge, Ellen Jong, Barbara DeGenevieve, Joseph Maida and Lorraine O'Grady, who, through their radical practices, engage in such consciousness shifting in elegant, surprising, and provocative ways. Guided by the feminist psychoanalytic canon of Julia Kristeva throughout, as well as being informed by the philosophy of Luce Irigaray and the critical theory of Judith Butler, Moscovitch situates these artists in the emerging lineage of feminist new materialism. She argues that the instability of intimacy leads to radical and performative objecthood in their work that acts as a powerful expression of revolt. Through this line of argumentation, Moscovitch joins a growing group of philosophers exploring object-oriented theories and practices as a new language for a new era. In this era, the hegemony of subjectivity has been toppled, and a new world of human ontology is built creatively, expressively and in the spirit of revolt.

A beautifully illustrated book-length publication on the contemporary artist and Academy Award–nominated filmmaker Garrett Bradley, whose quietly devastating work blurs the space between fact and fiction. Garrett Bradley works across narrative, documentary, and experimental modes of filmmaking to address themes such as race, class, familial relationships, social justice, and cultural histories in the United States. Her collaborative and research-based approach to filmmaking is often inspired by the real-life stories of her protagonists. This book explores Bradley’s work through the lens of devotion and features conversations with the artist and contributions from the likes of Ashley Clark, Arthur Jafa, Joy James, Tyler Mitchell, Kevin Quashie, and Claudia Rankine. This is the first volume in a new series of readers copublished with Lisson Gallery entitled Re:, which will respond to a number of its artists and themes past and present. Adopting archival material alongside newly shot footage, Bradley’s films exist simultaneously in the past, present, and future, not only disrupting our perception of time, but also breaking down our preconceived ideas about objectivity, perspective, and truth-telling. These narratives unfold naturally in both feature-length and short form, revealing a multitude of individual and collective stories. The social, economic, and racial politics of everyday life—its joys, pleasures, and pains—are lyrically and intimately rendered on screen.

Four decades of multimedia exploits in race, art politics and subjectivity: a long-overdue survey on conceptual performance artist Lorraine O'Grady Conceptual performance artist Lorraine O'Grady burst into the contemporary art world in 1980 dressed in a gown made of 180 pairs of white gloves and wielding a chrysanthemum-studded whip. For the next three years, O'Grady documented her exploits as this incendiary fictional persona, visiting gallery openings and providing critiques of the racial politics at play in the New York art scene. The resulting series, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, was merely the beginning of a long career of avant-garde work that would continue to build upon O'Grady's conceptions of self and subjectivity as seen from the perspective of a Black woman artist. This survey of O'Grady's work spans four decades of her career and features nearly all of her major projects, as well as Announcement, the opening series of a new performance piece seven years in the making. Contextualized by an extensive timeline with letters, journal entries and interviews, Both/And provides a long-overdue close examination of O'Grady's artistic and intellectual ambitions. Before she became an artist at the age of 45, Lorraine O'Grady (born 1934) worked as an intelligence analyst for the United States government, a translator, and a rock music critic for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone. O'Grady's unique life experiences, as well as her identity as a diasporic subject, have informed her multidisciplinary practice across live performance, video, photomontage, public art and cultural criticism. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

Through meticulous examinations, this book analyzes how women update their identities and articulate their feelings through clothing and art in protests, politics in the United States in the 20th century. Topics explored include the suffragists and their impact on contemporary art, the significance of the red dress in both The Handmaid’s Tale and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement, the impact of the Miss America protests, the rising popularity of the pantsuit for women, the recent dominance of the pussyhat, and the way that feminist slogans are disseminated on t-shirts. Movements discussed include craftivism, hashtag culture, feminism, the CROWN act, Pantsuit Nation, socially-committed stores, and more. Interdisciplinary and intersectional at its core, addressing numerous areas, including fashion, sociology, visual culture, art history, feminism, and popular culture; Fashioning Politics and Protests uncovers how women continue to use visual means, explored via their clothing, to change the world.