Lorraine O’Grady’s Brooklyn Museum Exhibition: Both/And

The Brooklyn Museum – one of oldest and largest art museums in the U.S. – is the cultural, recreational, and educational center of Brooklyn. During the pandemic, the Brooklyn Museum offered food distribution services and other financial aid through the museum workers relief fund. Located near Prospect Heights, the Brooklyn Museum provides Brooklyn with an amazing collection of contemporary art.

The blooming cherry blossoms and new-found chatter from people lined on the stone benches surrounding the facade of the Brooklyn Museum seemed to mark the spring season coming back to life in Brooklyn. As the museum staff looked at tickets and ushered people inside, memories of elementary school field trips and family visits to the museum came rushing back.

Of the available exhibitions, the Brooklyn Museum recently added a new show, Lorrraine O’Grady: Both/And. It is a retrospective of a Black woman artist dedicated to exposing the ways Black culture has existed throughout centuries of westernized America. Twelve major projects of Lorraine O’Grady speak to the ways the Black experience is overlooked in Western Modernist art, but, as O’Grady explains, not invisible to the trained eye.

Lorraine O’Grady’s Landscape (Western Hemisphere) depicts a video of O’Gradys hair close up with environmental noises of trees rustling in the background. At first glance, the hair and its natural irregular curls resemble trees swaying in the wind, but, at a closer look,the hair can be identified and the once-natural environmental sounds turn artificial. This looped video is featured next to Frederic Edwin Church’s Tropical Scenery, 1873. Parallels can be drawn between the texture ranges of O’Gradys hair, from loose and soft to tighter wound curls and the ambient environmental sounds changing from tropical to harsher coastal noises.

Displayed next to Lorraine O’Grady’sLandscape (Western Hemisphere) is Frederic Edwin Church’s Tropical Scenery, 1873.Frederic Edwin Church, one of the great Western landscape painters of the 19th century, depicts a classic Western landscape using many classic techniques such as soft outlines and the suffused golden light. This painting, as O’Grady points out, speaks to “the way the historical forces of colonialism and slavery shaped both the actual landscape of the Americas and the bodies that populate it, especially those who descend from the enslaved.”

The pairing of Lorraine O’Grady’s landscape and the landscape of Frederic Edwin Church causes the viewer to think about what is left out of classic Western landscape paintings, and more specifically the Black experience and history that is severely overlooked.

Visiting the Brooklyn Museum filled me with inspiration and a new-found understanding of the ways race and Western art are linked. Although the Brooklyn Museum is not located in our neighborhood, it is one of Brooklyn's biggest treasures.