Lorraine O’Grady

Beginning October 17, in Room 11 of the Pavilions, Glenstone will present Cutting Out CONYT (1977/2017), a series of “haiku-like” diptych-poems by Lorraine O’Grady. The work is a reprisal of the artist’s 1977 series of “found” newspaper poems, Cutting Out the New York Times (CONYT), which was influenced by O’Grady’s early career as a research economist and intelligence analyst. O’Grady—a notable polyglot—spent years examining newspapers, reports, and transcripts, causing language to “melt away.” She returned to the collages forty years later, cutting and collaging enlarged reproductions of the 250 original poems into twenty-six new paired panels. The result is “counter confessional” poetry that converts public language into the private poetry of an individual with collective import. This presentation marks the debut of Cutting Out CONYT installed in its entirety as a sequence of quadriptychs, representing a new stage in the conceptualization of the piece and furtherance of O’Grady’s theory of the Both/And, a refutation of Western dualism.