Brooklyn Museum

 Left: Pablo Picasso, The Sculptor , 1931, oil on plywood, 285 x 96 cm; right: Pablo Picasso, The Supplicant Woman , 1937, gouache on wood, 24 x 18.5 cm. Both: © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy: Musée national Picasso, Paris

Left: Pablo Picasso, The Sculptor, 1931, oil on plywood, 285 x 96 cm; right: Pablo Picasso, The Supplicant Woman, 1937, gouache on wood, 24 x 18.5 cm. Both: © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy: Musée national Picasso, Paris

Warming over Hannah Gadsby’s stand-up Picasso takedown from 2018, “It’s Pablo-matic” undermines the Brooklyn Museum’s own staff and even gatekeeps the privileges of non-expertise.

 Lorraine O’Grady (American, born 1934). Rivers, First Draft: The Woman in Red starts painting the stove her own color , 1982/2015, digital chromogenic print from Kodachrome 35mm slides in 48 parts, 40 × 50 cm. Edition of 8 + 2 AP. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Lorraine O’Grady. Rivers, First Draft: The Woman in Red starts painting the stove her own color, 1982/2015, digital print, 40 × 50 cm. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Exhibitions are frequently deemed “overdue”, but perhaps nowhere is it as true as with the first retrospective of Lorraine O’Grady, the 81-year old trailblaizer of feminst performance art, which opened at the Brooklyn Museum last month. Isaac Jean-François on her expansive, celebratory work.