Lorna Simpson 1960–

Visual artist

Sought Out African-American Artists

Fused Several Modern Art Trends

Began Using Film

Selected exhibitions

Sources

Cutting-edge visual art of the 1990s and early 2000s, though given various stylistic names, reveals several consistent characteristics. One of these is political content aimed at challenging viewers to re-examine, both figuratively and literally, their own perspectives as art consumers and as players of roles in society. Another is the blurring of genre boundaries—both among the various media of visual art and between visual art and other media, such as print and film. Lorna Simpson, one of the most widely exhibited contemporary American artists and the first African-American woman ever to have her art exhibited at the prestigious Venice Biennale, expertly manipulates these themes and approaches them from a distinct African-American perspective.

Simpson was born in the Brooklyn, New York neighborhood of Crown Heights on August 13, 1960. She was an only child, and her artistic abilities were encouraged starting at an early age. Simpson attended the High School of Art and Design, one of a group of New York City schools which educate the city’s most talented students. For her undergraduate education Simpson moved on to New York’s School for the Visual Arts. A painter at first, Simpson did well in school and earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1982.

Sought Out African-American Artists

But Simpson was disenchanted with the largely white-dominated world of contemporary art, which offered her few African-American role models. During her undergraduate years she sought out an internship at the Studio Museum of Harlem in order to interact with other black artists. She also switched from painting to photography, and after graduation she traveled through Europe and Africa with camera in hand all the way.

Taking documentary photographs had a twofold effect on Simpson’s developing sensibility: it deepened her interest in social issues, and it forced her to think about the perspectives implicit in traditional photography itself. For Simpson, the traditional photographer (and the traditional, often male, artist in other forms) is something of a voyeur, observing life from a privileged perspective but not really interacting with it or asking the viewer to do so. Simpson told Essence that she was “tired of the viewer’s approach to looking at documentary images.” Entering the master’s degree program at the University of California at San Diego, Simpson resolved to use the basic materials of photography to challenge this voyeuristic perspective.

Graduating with an M.F.A. degree in 1985, Simpson soon placed work in group exhibitions around New York. Beginning with a show at New York’s Screens gallery in 1986, her works were also exhibited in a rapidly mounting series of solo exhibitions; in the particularly busy year of 1995, there were no fewer than seven. In 1990 that Simpson became the first black woman exhibited at the Venice Biennale in Italy, and her works were featured at such prestigious U.S. institutions as New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Every museum and gallery, it seemed, wanted a piece of the Lorna Simpson phenomenon, and in retrospect it was

At a Glance…

Born on August 13, 1960, in Brooklyn, NY; daughter of Elian and Eleanor Simpson; married and divorced; children; Zora Simpson Casebere. Education: New York School of Visual Arts, B.F.A., 1982; University of California at San Diego, M.F.A., 1985.

Career: Participated in group exhibits at Whitney Museum of American Art and Studio Museum in Harlem, 1989; became first African-American woman to have works exhibited at Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 1990; solo exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1990; created major film-based installation Interior/Exterior, Full/Empty, 1998; exhibition Cameos and Appearances mounted at Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002.

Selected awards: National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1985; Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, 1990; College Art Association grant, 1994; finalist, the Hugo Boss Prize of the Guggenheim Foundation, 1998; American Art Award, Whitney Museum, New York, 2001.

Addresses: Home —Brooklyn, NY, Gallery —Sean Kelly Gallery, 43 Mercer St, New York, NY 10013.

easy to see why: Simpson joined together a number of new artistic ideas in a synthesis that was multi-layered, entirely her own, and uniquely African-American.

Fused Several Modern Art Trends

None of the ideas were new in themselves. Simpson used the technique known as photo text—the superimposition of printed text on photographs or the captioning of photographs in unconventional ways; in this she was in line with other widely exhibited artists, such as Jenny Holzer, who experimented with the incorporation of text into visual art. Simpson, like other artists of the postmodern era, radically depersonalized her art; the faces of the human figures who populated her work were never shown, and, Simpson explained to Essence, “all the information or clues that point to a particular individual are eliminated from the image.” And social criticism was not new to modern art. But Simpson forged an elegant and challenging whole out of these various elements.

Many of Simpson’s works of the late 1980s and early 1990s consisted of sets of identical or nearly identical photographs of the same woman, shown only partially; Simpson often used the same model, a friend of hers, for different works. The photographs were then adorned with text or other elements that often commented on race and gender stereotypes or habits of thinking. Simpson’s 1989 “Guarded Conditions,” for example, shows six images of a woman from the rear, with her hands uncomfortably folded behind her back. The set of six images is broken up into 18 squares—a reference to anthropological photographs of Africans that often reduced them to physical characteristics.

By the mid-1990s, Simpson felt the need to go beyond her trademark photo-text format. “People hold certain expectations about my work, but outside expectations can be paralyzing.” Simpson told Essence. “I always feel more confident when I’ve listened to my own intuition.” Over the next several years, Simpson experimented with various media and with new ways of using photography in conjunction with the other arts.

Simpson’s photograph exhibition Figuring absence, shown in 1995 at New York’s Sean Kelly gallery, presented black-and-white urban scenes that had something of the look of crime-scene photographs; devoid of human figures, they nevertheless referred to human activity in accompanying texts that, in the words of Art in America, “hint at anonymous sexual encounters, voyeuristic obsessions and illicit activities.” Some observers noted a lowered emphasis on race in Simpson’s work of the mid-1990s, but she continued to focus on the gaze society directs toward black women. A constant that connected her earlier and newer styles was the tendency to make viewers question exactly what it was they were seeing in an artwork and why they saw it the way they did.

Began Using Film

Given the role that action, mystery, and ambiguity played in Simpson’s work, “it was all but inevitable,” noted Art in America in 1998, “that Lorna Simpson would try film.” Simpson’s film-based installation Interior/Exterior, Full/Empty, was created in Columbus, Ohio after the artist received a residency award at the Wexner Museum there, and it was later shown at various places around the country. This work exemplified the new ways in which Simpson challenged viewers’ perspectives.

In Interior/Exterior, Full/Empty, seven images, running on a 20-minute cycle, were projected on gallery walls, sometimes springing into action. Many of the images—couples meeting in a wooded area, a woman in a slip talking on the phone, two women in hushed conversation—were calculated to excite voyeuristic attention in the viewer, who is left uncertain as to the meaning of another image of two men seated, saying nothing. At the end, the viewer emerges into another room containing a large still print of the wooded area, adorned with Simpson’s trademark photo text. The text describes events that have occurred in the woods, and viewers realize how much they have not seen.

By 2002 Simpson had become one of the most widely talked-about artists in the United States. Married and later divorced, she lived with artist Jim Casebere and their young daughter, Zora Simpson Casebere, in a converted loft in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood. Her work had been exhibited all over the United States and Europe, and the list of museums that had acquired her works for their permanent collections included New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Selected exhibitions

Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 1990.

Wiener Secession, Vienna, Austria, 1995.

Interior/Exterior, Full/Empty, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, 1997.

Call Waiting, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada, 1998.

31, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Sources

Books

St. James Guide to Black Artists, St. James, 1997.

Periodicals

Art in America, December 1995, p. 86; May 1998, p. 123.

Artforum International, January 1994, p. 90.

Columbus Dispatch, November 23, 1997, p. F8.

Essence, December 1990, p. 36; May 1995, p. 59; May 2002, p. 172.

Los Angeles Times, March 31, 1990; March 10, 2001, p. F2.

Seattle Times, December 13, 1993, p. F1.

Tampa Tribune, October 24, 1999, p. Baylife-11.

On-line

Sean Kelly Gallery, http://www.skny.com

—James M. Manheim