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CU Boulder Professor Megan O'Grady's book fuses memoir and art criticism in ‘unusual and risky’ work that’s drawing fans and kudos

When it comes to art, your heart is as important as your brain. This is what Megan ��’G������� feels.

She should know. ��’G�������, assistant professor in art and art history at the University of Colorado Boulder, is the author of ,��published this year.

A former art critic at The New York Times, ��’G������� calls the book “unusual and risky,” but the gamble seems to have paid off. The New Yorker chose it as one of the best books of 2026 thus far, and it has received a starred Kirkus review. Art and literary publications, from Hyperallergic to The Yale Review, have covered it, and a wide range of readers have found her approach to art “resonant in their own lives.”��

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Megan O'Grady, assistant professor of art and art history at CU Boulder, is the author of ,��published this year. (Photo: Thorsten Trimpop)

The book focuses on five works of art, which frame, reflect or distill chapters in her own life. She quotes the artist Barbara Kruger, who defined art as “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.”

��’G������� concurs, saying: “I have often been bludgeoned by art’s beauty, energized or pulverized by its emotional content, vacuum-sealed within its force-field. I’ve looked at it and thought, This is exactly what it feels like to remember someone I lost, or, This is what love is, a tenderness toward existence.”

Additionally, she contends, art “provokes unanswerable questions about how to live in a fragmenting society. It enacts transfers of energy, joy and defiance. It suggests new forms of connection and belonging.”

��’G������� is a critic and essayist and has also written for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review��and Vogue.

Recently, she answered questions from Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine.��Her responses follows:

Question: How can a regular person have greater appreciation for art? Are there steps one could take?

��’G�������: In my view, your appreciation of art is no more or less refined as mine or anyone else’s. My book directly challenges the idea that one must be an expert to enjoy art, and I’m skeptical of approaches to art that feel precious or exclusionary. Part of being human is to look for meaning in life—and art is one mode of seeking.

How It Feels to Be Alive��models a mode of looking at art as an intimate encounter, one that deploys—in my experience, anyway—not instantaneously, but over time, in different seasons of life: as teenager trying to figure out who I was, or in moments of loss—after the end of a long relationship, or after losing my home and everything I owned in a freak accident.��

Art helped me think through becoming a parent, and the awareness that I had deeply implicated myself in our broken world. It changed the way I think about the natural world and the invisible histories written into the landscape. It made me look very clearly at people with very different experiences of American life than my own, and it challenged me to deal with some of my own unresolved feelings about all sorts of things: creating a home, the unconscious shame I had about my body, about materialism and guilt.��

I’ve always been interested in art’s capacity to make us feel things, to challenge the way we see ourselves understand the world around us. This, to me, is why we need art—in any form, be it visual art, music, literature—and why we come to it seeking answers or solace or self-recognition or things we can't put into words.��

We live in an era that both fears and devalues art, that often treats it as a commodity, an artifact to categorize by medium and period, or to instrumentalize in displays of political dominance. I’m especially concerned by characterizations of art as elitist, decorative or superfluous, and we can already see the result of our educational systems’ deprioritizing of the arts and humanities in declining creative and critical-thinking skills.��

We look at art with the same eyes we do everything else. What are you attracted to and why? Is there more to be learned from other works by a particular artist, or about the artists and the times they were responding to? Art is entirely subjective: It hits us all differently depending on where we’re at in life, our experiences and interests.��

I encourage readers to seek out the art in their midst—this is what I try to do, anyway. Build it into your life; get on mailing lists. For those interested in visual art who live in the Boulder area, the MFA show at CU Art Museum is a great place to see emerging artists addressing the issues of our time. There are exceptional art institutions as well as alternative art spaces across the country.��

Question: Your book has elements of a memoir and elements of art criticism. In taking this approach, you share portions of your life that range from joy and pain and points in between. Can you talk about how such open introspection might help the reader understand art better—or feel it more fully?

��’G�������:�� Art is private in origin and public in expression—this is essential to its power. As an art critic for��The New York Times, I found myself listening to artists’ stories, many of them intensely personal, and reflecting on everything that had led up to the creation of these charged objects we see in museums and galleries. The artists had risked a lot to make the work they did, and their trust in me was humbling. I began to think of the other side of the equation—what impact art had had in my own life, and what I was risking in my work as a critic.��

Things were heating up in the world—a global pandemic, a turn toward fascist politics, race and gender-based violence—and I began thinking more about why we should care about things like art in times that often feel chaotic and cruel. Because I did care, even though so many things about our culture leads us to cultivate cynicism and self-interest. Being honest about these things is a risk; truth-telling is a risk. Because art both exposes and asserts cultural values, it can really upset people.

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Agnes Martin, Friendship, 1963, gold leaf and gesso on canvas, 6 ft. 3 in. × 6 ft. 3 in. (190.5 × 190.5 cm). Gift of Celeste and Armand P. Bartos. (© Agnes Martin Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY)

These are the tensions that inspired me to write the book and that guided its structure. Honestly, we should all be taking risks right now.��

Question: If a student asked you to list five works of art that conveyed how it feels to be alive, how would you answer?

��’G�������: We all have to find the answer to this for themselves.��How It Feels to Be Alive��tackles recurring themes in my life and in the lives of some of the artists I’ve known.��

In the chapter on Agnes Martin, I’m thinking about connection and isolation, and the impact our friends have on us. A chapter that begins with Carrie Mae Weems’ “Kitchen Table Series” leads me consider the complexity of seeing oneself clearly when we’re so busy being seen. Kruger’s “Untitled (Your Body),” which kicks off chapter 3, was one of the first works of art that led me to understand what it meant to have a critical perspective on the world, and later, as a parent to a daughter, to confront my own internalized misogyny.��

The great performance artist Pope.L, with whom I traveled to Flint, Michigan, to do a project involving the tainted water—we bottled and sold it as a Pope.L-branded art object to raise money for the people of Flint—challenged my uneasy feelings about home as troubling national or personal identity, the subject of chapter 4. The last chapter is about environmental artists and how they reframe our position on Earth, anchored by the largely overlooked land artist and monumental sculptor Beverly Pepper.��

These are the major themes, but within each chapter, they become more complex, involving other artists and works. And they are certainly not the��only��themes in life—the book doesn’t try to be comprehensive. That would be impossible. Rather, it seeks to model a way of looking at art, encouraging others to seek out their own works of art in any form that are meaningful to them.��

Question: You mentioned that you love your students, who are “less interested in making a mark than in leaving no trace,” a great line. Your writing (and good writing generally) is also a form of art. Do your students appreciate that, particularly in the TikTok era? Do you have a sense of this?

��’G�������: They all see reading and writing as essential to their creative process. My graduate students, MFA candidates in arts practices who are learning where they fit into larger conversations about representation and politics, use writing to refine the conceptual elements of their visual practice—that is, to better grasp and articulate a strong point of view, which involves a great deal of reflection and critique. We’re all asking ourselves what’s important in this moment in time in which our attention is fragmented and monetized and so much of what used to connect us feels broken.

Most of the artists I teach and write about in the book—Glenn Ligon, Barbara Kruger, Arthur Jafa, Trevor Paglen, Robert Adams, Imani Jaqueline Brown and Carrie Mae Weems, just to name a few—use text or narrative extensively in their art and/or have a writing practice complementary to their visual work.

Question: Beverly Pepper’s art, which forms the basis of a chapter in your book, was criticized with sexist tropes, but it reflects (or punctuates) the monumental scale of the landscape and the cosmos. Perhaps this question is outside the realm of how it feels to be alive, but your recounting of this episode spurs a question about how it feels to be a female artist in a male-dominated world. Or, more generally, how it feels to create art that is the “deeply rooted understory.”��

��’G�������: Part of what thrills me about being a critic is looking at a single work of art over time and thinking about how it can reveal tremendous cultural shifts, and personal ones.��

Pepper’s story, for me, is��very��much��about how it felt to be alive as a discredited or overlooked artist—one who was making work that was by any measure groundbreaking and radical. It is dehumanizing not to be recognized for one’s work because of the body one is born into.��

In the last chapter, I play with the idea of the anomaly—in art history, but also in the cosmos. Humans always center themselves, but what if, as Pepper and other artists have done, we centered the land instead, reframing our perspective? What if we are the anomalies? This is what art and art criticism does best: reframe and challenge our assumptions.

Pepper’s anomalousness is but one example of the many people left out of art’s dominant narratives. Art history is a set of stories that are continually being rewritten, in part because so many people were left out of previous drafts, or because considerations of their work were so essentializing. In the book, I argue that it is impossible to make art or behold it separately from the conditions of its making and beholding.��

Question: In the chapter “Forces of Nature,” you ruminate on the landscape of Colorado, suggesting that remarking on its humbling effect is “cliché.” Can an observation or feeling that might be called a cliché be expressed in a way that is not cliché?��

��’G�������:��I certainly hope so! Art/literature/music show us this time and again—that the things others have experienced before us have the capacity to compel us anew via the human imagination. Life, at the end of the day, is a cliché. Behind human is a cliché. It has all been felt before—this is part of what makes art capable of transcending time and place—and yet there will always be more to think, to see, to say.��

Question: You offer an extended meditation on Agnes Martin’s Friendship, particularly by the suggestion to approach her work “as you would cross an empty beach to look at an ocean.” That seems to suggest that we should have an emotional and intellectual receptivity?

��’G�������:��Those are Martin’s words, not mine. She articulated this as an ideal—an ambition for her work. She was reaching the peak of her powers just as conceptual art, with its theories and manifestos, was beginning to dominate the conversation. Martin, who found solace in Christian and Buddhist thinkers, wanted something less intellectual from her work: to induce a particular feeling of infinitude, humility, wonderment and vastness in spectators.��

In my book, I return a few times to Martin’s image of crossing the beach to look over the ocean. In her life, Martin had the experience more than once of coming metaphorically to the edge of the shore, or precipice, in her life—as, perhaps, we all have, in our own ways, when we’re at loose ends. It is both exhilarating and terrifying to look into the great beyond, and she confronted this to a degree that perhaps no artist has before or since.

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