Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson (born August 13, 1960) is an American photographer and multimedia artist whose works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Lorna Simpson was born on August 13, 1960, and grew up in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.

Her parents, a Jamaican-Cuban father and African-American mother, took her to numerous plays, museums, concerts and dance performances as a child.

Simpson attended the High School of Art and Design and took courses at the Art Institute of Chicago in summer while visiting her grandmother.

Prior to receiving her BFA, Simpson traveled Europe, Africa, and the United States further developing her skills through documentary photography.

She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with photo-text installations such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal that questioned the nature of identity, gender, race, history and representation.

Simpson continues to explore these themes in relation to memory and history using photography, film, video, painting, drawing, audio, and sculpture.

At the same time, her work was included in The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s, an exhibition presented by The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Simpson attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting in 1982.

During that time, she interned at the Studio Museum in Harlem, acquainting herself with the practice of artist in residence David Hammons.

Simpson earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California at San Diego in 1985.

Her focus was between Photography and Conceptual art, and her teachers included Allan Kaprow, Eleanor Antin, filmmakers Babette Mangolte, Jean-Pierre Gorin and poet David Antin.

Here she developed her signature style of combining text with studio-like portraiture, while questioning if documentary photography was factual or served as a constructed truth generated by photographer themselves.

These works analyzed stereotypical narratives of African-American women within American culture.

Simpson was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1985, and in 1990, she became the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale.

She was also the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art with her Projects 23 exhibition.

Simpson's 1989 work, Necklines, shows two circular and identical photographs of a black woman's mouth, chin, neck, and collar bone.

The white text, "ring, surround, lasso, noose, eye, areola, halo, cuffs, collar, loop", individual words on black plaques, imply menace, binding or worse.

The final phrase, text on red "feel the ground sliding from under you," openly suggests lynching, though the adjacent images remain serene, non-confrontational and elegant.

In 1990, she became the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale.

In 1990, Simpson had one woman exhibitions at several major museums, including the Denver Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.

In 1997, Simpson received the Artist-in-Residence grant from the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, where she exhibited her works in photography.

Simpson began working in film in 1997 with Call Waiting (1997).

Simpson's "interests in photography [has] always been paralleled by an interest in film, particularly in the way that one structurally builds sequences in film."

In 2001, she was awarded the Whitney Museum of Art Award, and in 2007, her work was featured in a 20-year retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in her hometown of New York.

Simpson's first European retrospective opened at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2013, then traveled to Germany, England, and Massachusetts.

She has been one of a handful of African-American artists to exhibit at the Jamaica Arts Center in Queens, New York and then to the gallery in Soho.

She first exhibited paintings in 2015 at the 56th Venice Biennale, followed by a showing at the Salon 94 Bowery.

In 2016 Simpson created the album artwork for Black America Again by Common.

During the same year, she was featured in the book In the Company of Women, Inspiration and Advice from over 100 Makers, Artists, and Entrepreneurs. In a 2017 issue of Vogue Magazine, Simpson showcased a series of portraits of 18 professional creative women who hold art central to their lives.

The women photographed included Teresita Fernández, Huma Bhabha, and Jacqueline Woodson.

Inspired by their resilience, Simpson said of these women, "They don't take no for an answer".

Simpson's work is included in the Afrofuturist Period Room exhibition Before Yesterday We Could Fly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

While she started her career a conceptual photographer, she has since explored video, installation, drawing, painting and film.

Simpson's goal is to continue to influence the legacy of black artists by speaking with artists and activists such as the Art Hoe Collective.

When asked about her career Simpson says, "I've always done exactly what I wanted to do, regardless of what was out there. I just stuck to that principle and I'm a much happier person as a result. And I can't imagine trying to satisfy any particular audience".

Simpson's work often portrays black women combined with text to express contemporary society's relationship with race, ethnicity and sex.

In many of her earlier works, the subjects are photographed with obscured faces, causing a denial of gaze and the interaction associated with visual exchange.

Simpson's use of "turned-back figures" was used to not only "refuse the gaze" but to also "to deny any presumed access to the sitter's personality, and to refute both the classificatory drives and emotional projections typically satisfied by photographic portraiture of black subjects."

It has also been suggested that these figures "stand for a generation's mode of looking and questioning photographic representation" Through repetitive use of the same portrait combined with graphic text, Simpson's "anti-portraits" have a sense of scientific classification, addressing the cultural associations of black bodies.