Artist Highlight #2 : Lorna Simpson
Lorna Simpson in her studio. Source: unknown.
Lorna Simpson, Collide, 2019. Photograph by James Wang.
In 2018, Vogue nominated the enigmatic multidisciplinary artist Lorna Simpson as “America’s most defiant conceptual artist” anticipating her Hauser & Wirth exhibition “Unanswerable” in London. But Simpson has been a premier force for conceptual art - principally photography and collage - since 1985 when the artist graduated with her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Her work encourages self and societal reflection. Lorna Simpson’s thought-provoking photographs, collages, paintings and films challenge and redefine malleable constructions of history and identity through the appropriation of figure and text.
Lorna Simpson was born in 1960 in Brooklyn, New York. She got her first Polaroid camera by cutting and mailing coupons from Kleenex boxes. To Simpson, photography “opened up a dialogue with the world” and she went on to pursue her education in Photography (Vogue). She received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York and went on to receive her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. It was in San Diego that Lorna Simpson developed her signature conceptual style harmonising two passions: photography and poetry.
Lorna Simpson, Gestures and Reenactments, 1985. Photograph by James Wang.
Her MFA thesis culminated in a work, Gestures and Reenactments, comprising six large scale photographs of a Black man in different poses with his face obscured. Each photograph is appended by seven blocks of narrative poetic text on racial profiling, discomfort, struggle, and vulnerability. The work gained recognition in New York and was exhibited at the Alternative Museum. Simpson continued to work with the juxtaposition of fragmented poetry and evocative photography.
Lorna Simpson, Waterbearer, 1986. Source: unknown.
The resulting works are profoundly intimate and reflective. As Simpson iterates of her ensuing artistic career: “The subject that I reach towards most often is memory. But beyond the subject matter the common thread is my relationship to text and to ideas around representation. The work has changed in terms of medium, format, even in terms of genres.” However, interpersonal and societal relationships command prevalence: “gender and culture shape the interactions, relationships and experiences of our lives in contemporary multi-racial America” (Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography).
Her career has evolved over time, but many motifs are carried thoughtfully across each series such as collaging imagery from vintage editions of Jet and Ebony, magazines which “informed [her] sense of thinking about being Black in America and are both a reminder of [her] childhood and a lens through which to see the past fifty years of history” (Contemporary Art Society). Through her work Simpson often reflects on the Black female experience in America. Vintage clippings and archival photographs - where women merge with architecture, flora, and brushstrokes - assert immanent identities through arresting surrealism. Simpson’s work declares agency regarding representation: “The notion of fragmentation, especially of the body, is prevalent in our culture. We’re fragmented not only in terms of how society regulates our bodies but in the way we think about ourselves.”
Lorna Simpson, Same, 1991. Source: Speed Museum.
Lorna Simpson, Bits and Pieces, 1989. Source: unknown.
American conceptual artist and close friend of Simpson, Glenn Ligon reflects on the artist’s early career, where “Lorna’s work opened up a space to talk about Black interiority at a moment when the culture was obsessed with Black spectacle, not Black introspection.” Simpson’s work invites reflection on complex subjects regarding gender, race, ethnicity, identity, and historic canon. It explores deconstructed narratives of life in the United States. In the “Unanswerable” exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in 2018, curator Christine Takengny structured her thoughts on Simpson’s assembly of collages, photography, silkscreen paintings and found objects by connecting them to the ice cubes dappled about the gallery: “the way the artist creates new narratives with historical source-material in combination with her focus on the natural element of ice, suggests the idea of a standstill or of ‘being frozen’ in the past” (Contemporary Art Society).
Lorna Simpson at Hauser and Wirth, 2018. Photograph by Alex Delfanne.
Lorna Simpson, Kid Gloves, 1989. Photograph by James Wang.
Lorna Simpson, Monumentum, 2011
Lorna Simpson, With Hat, 2014. Photograph by: Genevieve Hanson.
Lorna Simpson, Wigs II, 1994-2006. Installation view by James Wang.
Lorna Simpson, Stereo Styles, 1988. Photograph by James Wang.
Lorna Simpson, Ice III, 2018. Photograph by James Wang.
Lorna Simpson, Source Notes, 2019. Hauser and Wirth, 2018
Lorna Simpson, Mind Reader, 2019. Photograph by James Wang.
Lorna Simpson, Test, 1988. Source: unknown.
Further Reading:
https://lsimpsonstudio.com/
https://lsimpsonstudio.com/bio
https://www.vogue.com/article/lorna-simpson-vogue-interview-march-2018-issue
http://www.contemporaryartsociety.org/news/friday-dispatch-news/lorna-simpson-unanswerable-hauser-wirth-london/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/arts/design/lorna-simpson-paintings-hauser-wirth.html
https://www.fep-photo.org/exhibitions/lorna-simpson-retrospective/
Veda Lane,
Head of Features, MADE IN BED