Skip to main contentBiographyIn her photographs and films, contemporary artist Lorna Simpson (born 1960) confronts issues of race, gender, memory, and identity. One of the key themes in her work is the relationship between image and language and the unreliability of both. Although she is known primarily for the pieces that integrate black-and-white photographic images and text, she experiments with other mediums as well.
Simpson was born in Brooklyn, New York, and continues to live and work there today. She studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California, San Diego. She began her career as a documentary photographer before moving into the studio and transitioning to fine art.
In Simpson’s iconic black and white images, she isolates a section of a body, almost always female and black. She rarely shows the face; often the image is cropped so that the face is not visible, or the figure is standing with her back to the camera. One piece might include a single image, or multiple images framed and arranged by the artist. She then combines the image or images with text. The artist says, “In remembering the things that I’ve read and the experiences that I’ve had, it’s the words, the things that are said, that stick in my mind: the inadequacy of words, as in the way that I or someone else was addressed in a situation, or the struggle of choosing the right words to relate an experience. Either way those words fall short or don’t really describe.” [1]
Untitled (2 Necklines), 1989, National Gallery of Art, is composed of two identical circular images of an African American woman, depicted from the mouth to the chest. She wears a white cotton shift with a scalloped edge, revealing her neck and collarbones. Between the two photographs are black blocks printed with words describing circular objects, followed by a phrase weighted with anxiety: “ring surround lasso noose eye areola halo cuffs collar loop feel the ground sliding from under you.” Several works, such as Stereo Styles, 1988, private collection, 1978–88, 1990, private collection, Double Negative, 1990, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and Coiffure, 1991, private collection, depict African American women’s hair, variously arranged, unkempt, or cut off and isolated, and combined with fragments of text.
An artist of extraordinary inventiveness, Simpson in later years has experimented with new themes, such as sexuality, history, and social isolation; in various mediums, such as film and printmaking; and with materials, such as printing images on glass or felt. Of printing on felt, she has said, “There is a kind of density that the felt has that’s very attractive, and the way that the images print on them, because of its surface, light is absorbed instead of reflected.” [2] Recent projects have included installations of found vintage photographs of African Americans, into which she inserted photographs of herself.
In 1990, Simpson became the first African American woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, and in 2007 the Whitney Museum of American Art staged a retrospective of twenty years of her work.
Notes
[1] Lorna Simpson, quoted in Deborah Willis, Lorna Simpson (San Francisco: The Friends of Photography, 1992), 56.
[2] Lorna Simpson, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U43hVVeT-o8
Lorna Simpson
born 1960
Simpson was born in Brooklyn, New York, and continues to live and work there today. She studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California, San Diego. She began her career as a documentary photographer before moving into the studio and transitioning to fine art.
In Simpson’s iconic black and white images, she isolates a section of a body, almost always female and black. She rarely shows the face; often the image is cropped so that the face is not visible, or the figure is standing with her back to the camera. One piece might include a single image, or multiple images framed and arranged by the artist. She then combines the image or images with text. The artist says, “In remembering the things that I’ve read and the experiences that I’ve had, it’s the words, the things that are said, that stick in my mind: the inadequacy of words, as in the way that I or someone else was addressed in a situation, or the struggle of choosing the right words to relate an experience. Either way those words fall short or don’t really describe.” [1]
Untitled (2 Necklines), 1989, National Gallery of Art, is composed of two identical circular images of an African American woman, depicted from the mouth to the chest. She wears a white cotton shift with a scalloped edge, revealing her neck and collarbones. Between the two photographs are black blocks printed with words describing circular objects, followed by a phrase weighted with anxiety: “ring surround lasso noose eye areola halo cuffs collar loop feel the ground sliding from under you.” Several works, such as Stereo Styles, 1988, private collection, 1978–88, 1990, private collection, Double Negative, 1990, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and Coiffure, 1991, private collection, depict African American women’s hair, variously arranged, unkempt, or cut off and isolated, and combined with fragments of text.
An artist of extraordinary inventiveness, Simpson in later years has experimented with new themes, such as sexuality, history, and social isolation; in various mediums, such as film and printmaking; and with materials, such as printing images on glass or felt. Of printing on felt, she has said, “There is a kind of density that the felt has that’s very attractive, and the way that the images print on them, because of its surface, light is absorbed instead of reflected.” [2] Recent projects have included installations of found vintage photographs of African Americans, into which she inserted photographs of herself.
In 1990, Simpson became the first African American woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, and in 2007 the Whitney Museum of American Art staged a retrospective of twenty years of her work.
Notes
[1] Lorna Simpson, quoted in Deborah Willis, Lorna Simpson (San Francisco: The Friends of Photography, 1992), 56.
[2] Lorna Simpson, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U43hVVeT-o8
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