Megan O'Grady

Megan O'Grady is a critic, essayist, author of How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, and Assistant Professor of Critical and Curatorial Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her work on contemporary art and literature has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Vogue.

Public Art Reopens Erased Histories Through Civic Imagination

At the Aspen Ideas Festival, artists Walter Hood, Janet Echelman and Glenn Kaino argued that imagination is not an ornamental artistic faculty but a civic practice, one that lets Americans contest official memory, inhabit public space differently and imagine plural futures. In a conversation moderated by Megan O’Grady, they described public art as most powerful when it resists fixed interpretation, draws viewers into bodily experience and keeps alive forms of attention that metrics, politics and technology tend to flatten.

The Aspen InstituteJul 2, 202621 min read