Lorraine O’Grady, a legendary writer and artist whose work sought to unsettle the fixed positions of Western binary thinking, died this past Friday at the age of 90. Immeasurable in its impact, O’Grady’s sprawling, interdisciplinary practice spanned performance, collage, video, poetry, criticism, remaining steadfast in its penetrating critique of racism and sexism.
 
In the early 1990s, O’Grady penned a quartet of critical essays for Artforum. In the text revisited here, published in the magazine’s April 1993 issue and coinciding with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s first retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, O’Grady considers the painter’s posthumous reception by the Black art world against the backdrop of his mainstream success.
—The editors

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan