March 2021 in Artforum
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This month in Artforum:
On the occasion of Lorraine O’Grady’s first major retrospective, curated by Catherine Morris and Aruna D’Souza and opening this month at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, Artforum reflects on the many achievements of an artist whose multivalent practice—incorporating everything from performance to writing to video and photocollage—has generated avenues for diasporic thinking and fresh strategies for confronting anti-Blackness. Catherine Damman takes the long view, assessing the full scope of O’Grady’s four-decade career, while artist and critic Mira Dayal provides a close read of her 1980/1994 Miscegenated Family Album. Finally, O’Grady herself gives an account of her Announcement of a New Persona (Performances to Come!), with an introduction by Artforum editor in chief David Velasco.
“Risk, I would suggest, is O’Grady’s primary medium, in a rich practice that spans collage, performance, and video.”
—Catherine Damman
“If you conceal everything, race, class, age, gender, what is left? What is possible?”
—Lorraine O’Grady
This year, a retrospective curated by Katy Siegel and Sarah Roberts for the Baltimore Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will offer a sweeping overview of Joan Mitchell’s oeuvre. In the run-up to the exhibition’s opening in San Francisco—recently rescheduled for this fall—Artforum invited art historians Molly Warnock and Elise Archias to illuminate Mitchell’s singular achievements.
“Duchamp is not, perhaps, an obvious comparison for Mitchell; yet Duchamp is a persistent presence in the artist’s early reception.”
—Molly Warnock
“Mitchell’s work suggest that there was another way of thinking about things, an alternative to simply destroying the easel picture and giving ourselves over to the pleasures of a nonrelational dissolution and disorientation.”
—Elise Archias
“At JOAN, there are many, many Arnold Kemps, known and unknown figures, people who are related to me and people whom I’ve never met.”
—Arnold J. Kemp
And: Cecilia Vicuña’s artist portfolio; Irene V. Small on Leonilson’s Ninguém, 1992; Durga Chew-Bose on Louis Fratino; Charles Aubin on Madeline Hollander; Diedrich Diederichsen on Critical Zones; and more than 35 exhibition reviews from around the globe.
Plus: Hari Nef on Veneno; Alex Kitnick on Thomas Crow’s The Hidden Mod in Modern Art: London, 1957–1969; Erika Balsom on James Benning’s PLACE; Gregg Bordowitz on “The Conference of the Animals”; Anthony Byrt on Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art; and Tavares Strachan shares his Top Ten.
