I was delighted to read and review Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Language, by Stephanie Sparling Williams, for caa.reviews. This was published online on March 25, 2022, and you can buy the book here.
The year 2020–21 was a banner one for artist Lorraine O’Grady, who earned a long-overdue retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, published an edited volume of her writings, and saw the first scholarly monograph of her work, Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Language. In this book, Stephanie Sparling Williams offers a timely rejoinder to the artist’s historical neglect, situating O’Grady’s peripatetic practice in her longstanding investment in language—first as a writer, linguist, and translator, and then as an artist…
A reader can tell that this book was a labor of love, and a model of a new art history in the making that is actively and bravely being shaped by scholars of color, whose commitment to decolonizing strategies, postcolonial, feminist, and queer theory is not reflective of recent trends but has been fundamental to their approaches to the discipline.
