Available From UC Press

Speaking Out of Turn is the first monograph dedicated to the forty-year oeuvre of feminist conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady. Examining O’Grady’s use of language, both written and spoken, Stephanie Sparling Williams charts the artist’s strategic use of direct address—the dialectic posture her art takes in relationship to its viewers—to trouble the field of vision and claim a voice in the late 1970s through the 1990s, when her voice was seen as “out of turn” in the art world. Speaking Out of Turn situates O’Grady’s significant contributions within the history of American conceptualism and performance art while also attending to the work’s heightened visibility in the contemporary moment, revealing both the marginalization of O’Grady in the past and an urgent need to revisit her art in the present.

Stephanie Sparling Williams is Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum. 

"Following the thread of language through the entire course of Lorraine O’Grady’s extraordinary career, in this impressive monograph Stephanie Sparling Williams charts a rigorous, thrilling line through the work of one of the most significant artists of our time."—Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem

"Insightful and compelling, Sparling Williams's analysis reveals the complex interplay between word and image in the groundbreaking career of artist Lorraine O’Grady. Throughout, Sparling Williams's sustained, nuanced, and layered engagement with the artist's use of language reveals its crucial role in pointing out—and strategically opposing—exclusionary practices in the art world, and beyond."—Rebecca Peabody, author of Consuming Stories: Kara Walker and the Imagining of American Race

"It is a rare treat to read a work about an iconic black feminist artist and critic written by an outstanding emerging black feminist artist and critic. Sparling Williams's Speaking Out of Turn offers powerful commentary on, and a breathtaking compendium of, Lorraine O’Grady’s incomparable artistry. This book is undoubtedly one for the ages."—Reiland Rabaka, author of The Negritude Movement and Forms of Fanonism