The artist and cultural critic Lorraine O’Grady has spent nearly fifty years tackling the knotty interrelations between text and image, a career that includes conceptual and performance art and essays such as “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” a foundational text in the feminist art history canon.
Her 1977 work, Cutting Out the New York Times, consists of twenty-six poems made from cut up Sunday editions of the newspaper. Forty years later, she has reimagined and reshaped the original works into twenty-six “haiku diptychs” in Cutting Out COTNYT. She writes, “Produced with 40 more years of life and aesthetic experience, I feel that it 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.”
– Eugenia Bell
