FOCUS: Lorna Simpson

Since the beginning of her career in the mid-1980s, Lorna Simpson has been well known for her conceptual photographs and videos that challenge historical and preconceived views of racial and sexual identity. FOCUS: Lorna Simpson will be the first museum exhibition to feature the artist’s large-scale acrylic, ink, and silkscreened paintings.

Rooted in her interest in photographic collage, Simpson’s recent paintings rework found imagery, often taken from news media and vintage magazines. For example, Then & Now, 2016, homes in on racial violence by incorporating photographs of past and present race riots. Most of the work, however, features images of women taken from issues of Ebony and Jet magazines from the 1950s to 1970s. Speaking on Moveableness, 2015, Simpson has said, “It’s based on an image that I found in an Ebony magazine from the sixties, the original image depicting a modernist interior and a woman ascending a staircase. There’s something in that image I found mesmerizing, not only in the architectural details but also in her stride.” As demonstrated in Moveableness, the artist overpaints and divides the images onto several panels, a process that connects to how women’s bodies are often presented, or regulated, in a fragmented manner. Thus the figures are isolated and removed from the original context, resisting a set narrative and causing them to look independent, strong, and defiant. As Simpson states, “For me, the images hearken back to my childhood, but are also a lens through which to see the past fifty years in American history.”

Lorna Simpson was born in Brooklyn, where she continues to live and work. She received a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and an MFA in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego. Simpson has exhibited extensively, both nationally and internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume, Paris; Brooklyn Museum; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Simpson has participated in distinguished international exhibitions such as Documenta 8 and 11, Kassel, Germany, and the 44th and 56th Venice Biennales; in 1990, she was the first African-American woman to exhibit work in the Venice Biennale.