LORNA SIMPSON is a celebrated artist and filmmaker, and one of the key representatives of contemporary American visual culture. Emerging in the 19905, Simpson juxtaposes elegant, often haunting photographic images of women, seldom in full view with fragments of texts. While commenting richly on the ways in which black women are seen, and the ways in which they see themselves, Simpson raises searching, philosophical questions about the relationship between image and text, and about the construction of the self A characteristic example of her work is Guarded Conditions (1989), a photo piece in which Simpson assembles fragmented Polaroid images of a female model With her fist clenched behind her back, face turned away from the viewer, Simpson isolates the model's emblematic gesture and demonstrates symbolically her refusal to be "framed" conventionally.
A new dimension - the spoken voice was later added to her work with her filmworks Call Waiting (1998), 31 (2002), Momentum (2011), and Chess (2013). Her portrait of Rihanna for the January 2021 cover of Essence has been deemed as one of the most iconic fashion images ever made by a panel of experts in The New York Marianne. Lorna Simpson was born in 1960 in Brooklyn, New York She attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting in 1982, and the University of California at San Diego, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in visuel arts in 1985.
Her work has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC She was also invited to show her work in celebrated international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale (1990 and 2015) and Documenta in Kassel, Germany (1987 and 2002). Simpson lives and works in New York.
In 2019 she was awarded the J. Paul Getty Medal. THELMA GOLDEN, curator of Simpson's 2002 project at the Studio Museum in Harlem, talks with the artist about the shift from her signature photographic work to her filmic and more sculptural art In her Survey, art historian and artist KELLIE JONES places Simpson's work in a context of the history of African-American culture as well as that of the recent history of self-portraiture in art through photography and performance Curator of Simpson's film and photographic presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, CHRISSIE ILES analyses in her Focus six film works the artist made between 1997 and 2002.
The artists fragmentary use of speech is paralleled in her Artist's Choice, an extract from the play Toodoa/ Una (2002) by American playwrght SUZAN-LORI PARKS. Artists writings include extracts from a conversation with Deborah Willis (1992), the previously unpublished text Mannered Observation (2002), and the Black Lives Matter-inspired poem We Have Been Whispering in Fach Other's Fars For Centuries, June 4th, 2020 Los Angeles (2020).
Finally, NAOMI BECKWITH's Update text focuses on Simpson's work produced over the past twenty years, investigating her most recent films, painting, collages and the developments in her practice that resulted in a deeper exploration of personal and collective identity and contemporary culture.
