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Lorraine O'Grady

Cutting Out CONYT

October 25–December 15, 2018

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT
Installation view
Alexander Gray Associates (2018)  

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT
Installation view
Alexander Gray Associates (2018)  

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT
Installation view
Alexander Gray Associates (2018)  

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT
Installation view
Alexander Gray Associates (2018)  

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT
Installation view
Alexander Gray Associates (2018)  

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT
Installation view
Alexander Gray Associates (2018)​

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT
Installation view
Alexander Gray Associates (2018)  

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT
Installation view
Alexander Gray Associates (2018)  

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT

Lorraine O'Grady: Cutting Out CONYT
Installation view
Alexander Gray Associates (2018)  

Cutting Out CONYT 07, 1977/2017, Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Cutting Out CONYT 07, 1977/2017

Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Diptych, each: 41.75h x 30w in, overall: 41.75h x 60w in

Edition of 12 + 1 AP

Cutting Out CONYT 17, 1977/2017, Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Cutting Out CONYT 17, 1977/2017

Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Diptych, each: 41.75h x 30w in, overall: 41.75h x 60w in

Edition of 12 + 1 AP

Cutting Out CONYT 10, 1977/2017, Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Cutting Out CONYT 10, 1977/2017

Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Diptych, each: 41.75h x 30w in, overall: 41.75h x 60w in

Edition of 12 + 1 AP

Cutting Out CONYT 13, 1977/2017, Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Cutting Out CONYT 13, 1977/2017

Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Diptych, each: 41.75h x 30w in, overall: 41.75h x 60w in

Edition of 12 + 1 AP

Cutting Out CONYT 03, 1977/2017, Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Cutting Out CONYT 03, 1977/2017

Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Diptych, each: 41.75h x 30w in, overall: 41.75h x 60w in

Edition of 12 + 1 AP

Cutting Out CONYT 15, 1977/2017, Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Cutting Out CONYT 15, 1977/2017

Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Diptych, each: 41.75h x 30w in, overall: 41.75h x 60w in

Edition of 12 + 1 AP

Cutting Out CONYT 26, 1977/2017, Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Cutting Out CONYT 26, 1977/2017

Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

41.75h x 30w in (106.05h x 76.20w cm)

Edition of 12 + 1 AP

Cutting Out CONYT 16, 1977/2017, Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Cutting Out CONYT 16, 1977/2017

Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Diptych, each: 41.75h x 30w in, overall: 41.75h x 60w in

Edition of 12 + 1 AP

Cutting Out CONYT 19, 1977/2017, Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Cutting Out CONYT 19, 1977/2017

Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Diptych, each: 41.75h x 30w in, overall: 41.75h x 60w in

Edition of 12 + 1 AP

Cutting Out CONYT 09, 1977/2017, Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Cutting Out CONYT 09, 1977/2017

Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Diptych, each: 41.75h x 30w in, overall: 41.75h x 60w in

Edition of 12 + 1 AP

Cutting Out CONYT 18, 1977/2017, Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Cutting Out CONYT 18, 1977/2017

Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Diptych, each: 41.75h x 30w in, overall: 41.75h x 60w in

Edition of 12 + 1 AP

Cutting Out CONYT 04, 1977/2017, Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Cutting Out CONYT 04, 1977/2017

Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Diptych, each: 41.75h x 30w in, overall: 41.75h x 60w in

Edition of 12 + 1 AP

Cutting Out CONYT 24, 1977/2017, Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Cutting Out CONYT 24, 1977/2017

Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Diptych, each: 41.75h x 30w in, overall: 41.75h x 60w in

Edition of 12 + 1 AP

Cutting Out CONYT 22, 1977/2017, Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Cutting Out CONYT 22, 1977/2017

Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Diptych, each: 41.75h x 30w in, overall: 41.75h x 60w in

Edition of 12 + 1 AP

Cutting Out CONYT 25, 1977/2017, Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Cutting Out CONYT 25, 1977/2017

Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Diptych, each: 41.75h x 30w in, overall: 41.75h x 60w in

Edition of 12 + 1 AP

Cutting Out CONYT 20, 1977/2017, Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Cutting Out CONYT 20, 1977/2017

Letterpress printing on Japanese paper, cut-out, collage on laid paper

Diptych, each: 41.75h x 30w in, overall: 41.75h x 60w in

Edition of 12 + 1 AP

Press Release

Alexander Gray Associates presented Cutting Out CONYT, an exhibition of new work by Lorraine O’Grady (b.1934). Featuring a selection of prints from Cutting Out CONYT (1977/2017), in O’Grady’s words, the show revealed her ongoing commitment to “establishing the diptych as a ceaseless conversation of difference.”

Cutting Out CONYT returns to O’Grady’s 1977 work, Cutting Out The New York Times (CONYT), which consists of 26 found newspaper poems made between June 5 and November 20, 1977 from successive editions of the Sunday Times. Building on the 1977 series’ successful transformation of public language into private, in Cutting Out CONYT, O’Grady repurposes the collages to achieve a failed goal of the original work: the creation of what she terms “counter-confessional” poetry. Cutting Out CONYT culls the poems and reshapes the remains into 26 new works that adopt a form the artist refers to as “haiku diptychs.” Each of the haiku takes as its source a single 1977 poem. By concentrating and refining the original series’ voice, Cutting Out CONYT serves as a bridge between O’Grady’s early and later works. As she explains, “Making it has allowed me to maintain the tensions between my more explicit voice and my less explicit voice in a way that feels fruitful to me.”

These two voices, which O’Grady has alternately identified as “narrative/political,” “expressive/argumentative,” “inner-directed/outer-directed,” and “post-black/black,” inform all of her work. With the quip, “I was ‘post-black’ before I was ‘black,’” she characterizes her artistic trajectory from the 1970s into the 1980s as an evolution from producing deeply personal works imbued with her identity to more overtly politically motivated ones. As a result, like its CONYT source material, Cutting Out CONYT references what O’Grady describes as “a diaspora mind, a diaspora experience.” Like other diasporic “new world” artworks, including Rivers, First Draft (1982/2015) and Landscape (Western Hemisphere) (2010/2011), this series is implicitly political. O’Grady expands, “Produced with 40 more years of life and aesthetic experience, I feel that it [Cutting Out CONYT] embraces the mysterious intertwinings of narrative and politics, post-blackness and blackness in a way that Cutting Out The New York Times could not accomplish or even imagine.” 

At the same time, Cutting Out CONYT engages with the counter-confessionalism of O’Grady's 1977 poems and transforms it via its diptych format into something distinctly other. Refuting hierarchical binaries through its two-panel presentation, the series insists on both/and rather than either/or. Its structure allows O’Grady to question apparent oppositions between her voices while maintaining their productive tensions, siting her work in the interstitial space between personal and political, inner and outer, and post-black and black. Ultimately, as she summarizes, “There was no extrication of the personal from the political, because these qualities were not opposites but obverse and reverse of the same coin.”