Lorna simpson artist biography

She created large-scale photographic works with spare, staged images of Black figures, seen from behind or in fragments, on neutral studio backgrounds with incisive accompanying text. From the s onwards, Simpson has looked to printing photographs on felt while also exploring the capacity of film and video to expand on the core themes of her practice—desire and isolation.

Simpson consistently explores other avenues for her visual investigations and has also incorporated collage and painting into her practice. She has been awarded several prizes, including a J. Paul Getty Medal in Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects.

Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. American photographer and multimedia artist. For the singer, see Lorna Simpson singer. BrooklynNew York. Early life [ edit ]. Education [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. Work [ edit ]. Personal life [ edit ]. Recognition [ edit ]. List of works [ edit ]. Publications [ edit ].

Lorna simpson artist biography: Lorna Simpson received her

References [ edit ]. Retrieved February 28, Retrieved August 11, The Fabric Workshop and Museum. Southeast Asia, China, the West, and the Rest". April 30, Retrieved March 4, Aperture Foundation NY. Retrieved April 8, The New York Times. ISSN Encyclopedia Britannica. Modern women: Women artists at the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

ISBN OCLC James Guide to Black Artists. Detroit: St. Easy for Who to SaySimpson's work fromdisplays five identical silhouettes of black women from the shoulders up wearing a white top that is similar to women portrayed in other of Simpson's works. The women's faces are obscured by a white-colored oval shape each with one of the following letters inside: A, E, I, O, U.

Underneath the corresponding portraits are the words: Amnesia, Error, Indifference, Omission, Uncivil. In this work Simpson alludes to the racialization in ethnographic cinema and the revocation of history faced by many people of color. Simpson's work Guarded Conditions, created inwas one in a series in which Simpson has assembled fragmented Polaroid images of a female model whom she has regularly collaborated with.

The body is fragmented and viewed from behind, while the back of the model's head is sensed as being in a state of guardedness towards possible hostility she can anticipate as a result of the combination of her sex and the color of her skin. The complex historical and symbolic associations of African-American hairstyles are also brought into play.

Three images of the same woman bristle against one another, revealing different aspects of her neckline, with glimpses of lips and hair, while the rest of her identity is hidden. Below, a play on the word "neck" unravels, each term conjuring various situationist possibilities for the woman from competition to fear to romance to fashion.

The serrated edge of her white t-shirt hints at underlying violence, a sentiment echoed in the jarring inclusion of the words "neckless" and "breakneck. Seen without the words, these images could be read as ambiguous portraits of a mysterious woman, but Simpson demonstrates how even the most seemingly simple additions of language can entirely alter our perception of an image, conjuring up the vast complexity of our history.

Highlighting fragile women's necks allowed Simpson to push forward into the horrifying territory of America's lorna simpson artist biography, when lynching was common practice, forcing us to look at issues that have so often been brushed under the carpet. This direct confrontation of America's dark history has had a profound impact on artists since, particularly African-American artist Kara Walker, who similarly forces viewers to walk directly into the horrors of the past.

Along with the overt reference to violence, undercurrents of female strength and authority are also suggested by the woman's defiant stance and closed, set lips. Paper magazine described this visual complexity as a "striking commentary on Black female sexuality, lynching, and ideas of supremacist propriety. A series of twenty-one wigs are laid out in a haphazard grid formation, arranged like scientific artifacts in a museum display.

Each illustrates a different hairstyle, including Afros and braided hair, alongside blonde, wavy tresses and even wigs for dolls. Simpson printed these images onto panels of white felt, a soft material which itself has a hair-like quality. Alongside these images a series of short, cryptic statements are interspersed, each telling anecdotes relating to various themes including slavery, drag, celebrity, and the stereotypical perceptions we cultivate toward others.

For example, one story relates how a slave couple were able to escape by having the lighter skinned wife pretend that her darker skinned husband was her own slave. Even though she couldn't read, she had memorized the mannerisms of her arrogant owners and was able to bypass trouble along the way due to her gestures that mimicked this white arrogance.

This artwork delves into the history of African-American hairstyles, revealing how varied they have been through the ages. Laying them out in this way allows Simpson to highlight just how politicized hair can be; the blonde wig alludes to the oppressive pressures on Black women to change their natural appearance, while the Afro styles could be read as an empowered act of defiance in embracing one's true essence.

On the one hand, Simpson's works such as this can inevitably be read as a commentary on the issues around African-American culture and the pressures to conform, but the broader themes around inclusion and self-acceptance are universal ones to which we can all relate. Likening her practice to the Post-Blackness work of artist Glenn Ligon and writer Thelma Golden, in which artists want to move beyond being understood solely for the color of their skin, Simpson argues, "For me, the specter of race looms so large because this is a culture where using the Black figure takes on very particular meanings, even stereotypes.

But, if I were a white artist using Caucasian models, then the work would be read as completely universalist. A young, bright-eyed woman looks out with hopeful optimism, while her hair sweeps upwards high into the sky to lorna simpson artist biography a dreamy swirl of iridescent blue light. Black and white photographic material is combined here with the loose, aqueous language of watercolor, lending it a dramatic, theatrical flourish.

In the s Simpson first began making collages with material sourced from her grandmother's vintage collection of African-American Magazines from the s including Jet and Ebony ; the advertisements aimed at women fascinated her, particularly the pressures on women to conform to the Caucasian American ideal with skin lighteners or hair relaxants.

Since Simpson has been adding painterly passages to these collages, transforming her protagonists with fantastical, bouffant hairstyles that defy logic and gravity. Much like her earlier artwork WigsSimpson explores the political implications tied up in hair with this series, suggesting the act of letting their natural hair go wild as an act of liberation for Black or African-American women.

Poet, scholar, and author Elizabeth Alexander sees Simpson's treatment to these women as a powerful form of emancipation, observing, "In Lorna Simpson's collages Black women's heads of hair are galaxies unto themselves, solar systems, moonscapes, volcanic interiors. The hair she paints has a mind of its own. It is sinuous and cloudy and fully alive.

It is forest and ocean, its own emotional weather. Black women's hair is epistemology, but we cannot always discern its codes. But it is also a wash, a shadow cast over what we cannot know in these women. In this two-part, seven-minute long video, a striking group of golden dancers emerge, twirling and pirouetting in front of a stark white backdrop.

Each figure wears an identical gold leotard and has gold spray-painted onto their skin and huge Afro wigs, making them difficult to distinguish from one another. As well as dancing, the figures are also filmed as they wait and prepare for their performance, while cuts and loops in the film create a disjointed, non-linear sequence. Simpson drew inspiration for this video from a memory of her own performance at the Lincoln Center in New York when she was around 11 years old.

Much like the performers seen here, Simpson was adorned in head-to-toe gold paint and performed a ballet routine with a group of others.

Lorna simpson artist biography: Lorna Simpson (born August 13, )

But she found the experience painfully difficult, learning that she was better suited to be behind, rather than in front of the camera. She recalled how it was "like performing from a black hole - I knew immediately it was not for me. Although she does not appear in the film, the group of male and female dancers acts as a refracted metaphor for her past selves, while breaks and repetitive elements of the film re-enact the fragmentary nature of memory.

Writer Thomas J. Lax notices how "In MomentumSimpson transforms the memory of a bygone moment into a legible form. This video installation is composed of three adjacent projections; on one screen a man plays chess, on another a woman plays chess, while the third documents the musician Jason Moran playing the piano music he composed to accompany the work.

Refracted views break apart each figure into five parts, creating the strange sensation of entering a hall of mirrors where nothing is as it seems. As the video unfolds, it becomes clear the chess players are in fact playing the game against themselves. The characters grow old as the story unravels, which Simpson calls "a dissolve that indicates the passage of time.

Lorna simpson artist biography: Lorna Simpson (born August

The technique, which Simpson called "a Surrealist trope of trick photography" had shown up in a famous self-portrait by Marcel Duchamp and a portrait of Francis Picabia taken by an anonymous photographer. Another source of inspiration for this film came from another image, sent to Simpson by the art historian Sarah Thornton, featuring what Simpson described as "a beautiful portrait of an unknown man of African descent in a white straw hat Both the photographic series and this film work were a new point of departure for Simpson in which she moved beyond issues around racial tensions into broader territory, questioning the fragmentary nature of identity and memory.

Ultimately the work takes on a strange ambiguity that mirrors the complexity of our identities in a fragmented society, when issues of race and gender are more complex and divided than ever before, mirroring the same language that has been explored by Adrian Piper since the s. Curator and writer Joan Simon asks "In Simpson's project - in which one plays chess with oneself - how does one extract oneself from oneself to outwit oneself?

Who wins? Technically it would end in a draw and or extend into a Borgesian infinity. How does one become one's own doppelganger? Dark, angry clouds gather and swarm over an icy cold terrain, while vivid blue puffs below suggest mountains or freezing rocks. Combining monochrome, near photographic elements with painterly passages and shockingly bright color.