Art historian Megan O’Grady examines what inspires artists to create artworks, and what is the artist’s intended impact on the sensibilities of those who see their work. Whether the art, for instance, has cultural agency in an increasingly divisive and environmentally imperiled world.
O’Grady is art writer at large for the New York Times’ T: magazine, and her pieces have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Vogue and The New Yorker.
This collection is also collectively a prismatic analysis of the current state of the visual arts and a journalist’s memoir of her analysis of the lives and work of a dozen artists who challenged commodified art establishment in the US and internationally.
In depth chapters –Off-Grid, Home Fires, Mirroring, Bodies and Battlegrounds, Forces of Nature– with focus on rebel artists all who defined their own career paths committed to their own artistic voice, materials, and cultural purpose without establishment expectations of commissions, galleries and museums.
Profiled are multi-genre artists including silkscreen photographer Barbara Krugar, sculptor Beverly Pepper, fabric artist Marcella Marsala, photographers Heji Shin and Carrie Mae Weems, abstract expressionist sculptor Agnes Martin, and performance artist Pope L whose infamous ‘Crawl Performances’ were public protest ‘embodied installations’ on the streets of New York.
O’Grady’s title comes from Krugar’s theory of why artists do what they do no matter what is going on around them they must express …”the ability., through visual, verbal, gestural and musical means, to objectify one’s experience of the world: to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.”
O’Grady immersive command of art history and the allied visual arts including film, performance, sculpture, site-specific concepts, et al. is a master class of technical craft and art discourse and its specific vocabulary. Her book is also a memoir of personal issues vis-a-vis the arts, her travels and environmental activism. O’Grady’s commentary examines the relevance of sociopolitical activism in the arts dealing with in social justice and environmental issues.
The book contains two illustrated sections with fine color and B&W plates of representative pieces by the artists profiled. Their personal lives and artistic journeys are the heart of the book, their careers often intersecting with legendary rebels with an artistic cause like filmmaker Agnes Varda and painter Georgia O’Keefe,
Her objective and polemical essays come at a time when arts organizations are not only under attack by Trump’s Orwellian defunding of arts grants, organizations, museums and school programs. Government funding that was already a fraction of the US budget.
O’Grady’s essays articulate the vital role of ‘art as witness’ past and present to the cultural pulse of its time. Her interaction with artists’ work confront bigotry, racism, misogyny, homophobia and the laundry list of social ills that continue to poison the land of where freedom is supposedly enshrined in law by the 1st Amendment of the Constitution.
