Megan O'Grady with Kealey Boyd — How It Feels to Be Alive
Art critic and CU Boulder professor Megan O'Grady explores how five works of art reshaped her life, in conversation with Denver critic Kealey Boyd.
Why we picked this
O'Grady braids personal narrative with art criticism in a way that's rare — this is what it looks like when a lifelong looker finally writes the book she's been circling for decades. Kealey Boyd, Denver's sharpest working art critic, is the right interlocutor.
Megan O’Grady spent years writing about art for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker — but her debut book, How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, is something more personal. It opens with a teenage encounter with a museum photograph that changed how she understood the world, and builds from there into a meditation on what art actually does to us when we let it in.
The book takes five specific works of art and traces their rippling effects — on O’Grady’s life, on the artists who made them (often drawn from direct conversations), and on the wider cultural conversations those works entered and shaped. It’s part lyric essay, part cultural history, part memoir, and it argues that art is not decoration or entertainment but a genuine tool for navigating crisis, vulnerability, and self-conception. O’Grady is also an assistant professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the book reflects a rigorous eye disciplined by both scholarship and journalism.
In conversation with her is Kealey Boyd, a Denver-based art critic and 2025 Clyfford Still Museum Institute Residential Fellow, whose writing appears in Hyperallergic, Frieze, The Art Newspaper, and the Los Angeles Times. Together they represent two of the most intellectually serious voices in Denver’s visual art world, making this a conversation as much about how we learn to look as about any specific artwork or book.