Simpson, Lorna 1960–

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Lorna Simpson 1960–

Conceptual artist

At a Glance…

Explored Documentary Photography

Experimented With Photo Text

Focused on Detail

Exhibited Widely

Sources

Juxtaposing photographic images of an anonymous black woman with incongruous captions, artist Lorna Simpson gives a contemporary twist to territory mapped out by her conceptual forbearers. In the spirit of Belgian painter René Magritte’s L’usage de la parole #1 (“The Use of Words #1”), a painting that depicts a pipe with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” (“This is not a pipe.”) emblazoned below, Simpson questions the nature of language as symbol. But, while Magritte was content to explore the philosophical relationship between word and image, Simpson goes one step further. Focusing on the impact of cultural preconceptions on language, her photographs address issues of race and gender.

In Easy for Who to Say (1989), Simpson shows the repeated image of a black woman’s face, her features obscured by plaques bearing the letters “A,” “E,” “I,” “O,” and “U.” Beneath each portrait is a word corresponding to the lettered plaques—“Amnesia,” “Error,” “Indifference,” “Omission,” and “Uncivil.” Typical of the artist’s style, the piece is large in scale and utilizes a serial format. The monotony of that format in combination with the work’s partial abstraction evokes a sense of the Kafkaesque—a bizarre and frustrating feeling reinforced by the use of engraved, office-style plaques. Faceless and clinically labeled, Simpson’s image offers none of the clues the viewer seeks to “read” a portrait. “The viewer wants so much to see a face to read ’the look in the eyes,” or the expression on the mouth,” the artist said in an interview with Trevor Fairbrother for The Binational: American Art of the Late 80s. “I want viewers to realize that that is one of the mechanisms which they use to read a photograph. If they think, ’How am I supposed to read this, if I don’t see the face?’ they may realize that they are making a cultural reading that has been learned over the years, and then perhaps see that it is not a given.”

Bom in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1960, Loma Simpson was the only child of Elian and Eleanor Simpson. Attracted to art at an early age, she pursued her passion at the High School of Art and Design, a competitive secondary school in New York City, and, as a college student, at the School of the Visual Arts. Although she received sound technical training, Simpson found her formal education lacking. “While going to art school in New York,” she told Balcon magazine, “I realized that very little was said about artists of

At a Glance…

Born August 13, 1960, in Brooklyn, NY; daughter of Elian and Eleanor Simpson. Education: New York School of Visual Arts, B.F.A. in photography, 1982; University of California, San Diego, M.F.A. in visual arts, 1985.

Participated in group exhibits at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Studio Museum in Harlem, 1989; joined Josh Baer Gallery, 1989; became first African-American woman to show in the Venice Biennale, 1990; had solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, 1990. Works include text and photo pieces such as Easy for Who to Say, Flipside, and Bio, and the interactive multimedia composition Five Rooms.

Awards: National Endowment for the Arts, Arts Management Fellowship, 1985; AVA 9, Awards in the Visual Arts, 1989; Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, 1990.

Addresses: Dealer —Josh Baer Gallery, 476 Broome Street, Third Floor, New York, NY 10013.

color in any program.” To compensate for that deficiency, she took courses outside her curriculum and became involved with the Studio Museum in Harlem. “I had an internship there while I was going to undergraduate school,” she said, “in order to meet African-American artists and get to know what was going on in that contemporary set. That experience was really much more important than the ‘being educated and going to school route.’”

Explored Documentary Photography

As an undergraduate student Simpson’s interest shifted from painting to photography. “I first started out as a painter,” she explained, “but in undergraduate school I realized I wasn’t a very good painter. I was more interested in technique and was finding it difficult to know what to paint.” Her fascination with technique led Simpson to documentary photography, a medium she would explore for several years, documenting street life in Europe, Africa, and New York City.

By the time she had entered graduate school at the University of California at San Diego, Simpson had become disenchanted with the voyeurism implicit in documentary photography. “I was frustrated by the viewer’s assumptions as to how one should read the work and the photographer’s intentions,” she told Fairbrother. In search of a less problematic medium, she turned to film and performance art, an influence that would be felt in the theatrical quality of her mature photographic style.

Experimented With Photo Text

Still drawn to the social issues at the heart of her documentary photography, Simpson began to experiment with photo text, combining photographic images of anonymous black women with written copy. Working on a life-sized scale, she would take the objectification of the image implicit in documentary photography to an extreme. Zooming in on her subjects, studiously posed with faces obscured, Simpson would recreate them as abstractions. Minimal in composition and cold in mood, they became black “every women”—blank slates for the artist’s social commentary.

“All the information or clues that point to a particular individual are eliminated from the image,” Simpson explained to Essence magazine. “From there, I insert my own text or my own specific reading of the image to give the reader something they might not interpret or surmise, due to their educated way of looking at images.”

To enhance the anonymity of the image, Simpson pointedly employs the same model, actress, singer, and performance artist Alva Rogers. Although she refers to Rogers as her “alter ego,” the artist insists that her portraits are inspired by her own identity, but are not autobiographical. “My work comes out of personal experience,” she commented in the interview with Fairbrother, “but I abstract it so that the viewer will not take it as an autobiographical story.”

Focused on Detail

As her style matured, Simpson began to hone her images further, extracting complex meaning from even the smallest detail. Hair, a recurrent motif in her most recent works, is featured prominently in the 1990 piece 1978-1988. Picturing disembodied black braids blown up to larger-than-life scale, the piece incorporates intermittent plaques—some bearing consecutive dates, others engraved with words such as “knot,” “part,” “twist,” and “tear.” As an indicator of gender and racial identity, the braids take on political significance; as markers of the passage of time, they speak of personal development and nostalgia. According to the Museum of Modern Art’s curatorial assistant Jennifer Wells in Projects 23: Lorna Simpson, the text refers not only to the more obvious manipulation of hair, but also to the “tension that can exist between people and the stages of a dissolving relationship.”

A later piece, Flipside (1991), combines the hair motif with another recurring theme, the mask. A diptych (or two hinged pictures), Flipside shows the rear image of a model’s head and shoulders juxtaposed against a frontal view of an African mask. Beneath the photographs, a plaque reads, “The neighbors were suspicious of her hairstyle.” A sly commentary on pervasive racial prejudice, Flipside also questions the verity of the photographic image. “Photographic portraiture,” Simpson explained to Fairbrother, “only reveals the facade of the subject, no matter how detailed.”

Exhibited Widely

Greeted with widespread critical acclaim, Simpson’s work has been exhibited extensively. Although “confused” by her success, the artist attributes it to the unconventional venues she initially sought to display her work. “I never looked toward galleries or white institutions to support my work,” she told Balcon magazine. “I went through either individuals or institutions that had a much more pluralistic sense of what they wanted to show at a time when it was not, especially in New York, popular.”

Following her first solo exhibition at New York City’s now defunct Just Above Midtown Gallery in 1986, Simpson turned to Soho dealer Josh Baer to represent her. “The response to her work was immediately explosive,” Baer told Newsday in reference to her 1989 sell-out solo exhibition at his gallery. By 1990, the artist was well established in the exhibition circuit. In that landmark year, she became both the first African American woman to show in the prestigious Venice Biennale and the first to have a solo exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art’s Painting and Sculpture Gallery. In the early nineties, Simpson ventured into the interactive mixed media forum, entering her slave cabin exhibit Five Rooms at the Spoleto Festival USA. Successful at an unusually young age, Loma Simpson promises to make a lasting mark on the conceptual landscape.