Lorna Simpson (born August 13, 1960) is an American photographer and multimedia artist whose works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 1990, she became one of the first African-American women to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. 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.
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Early life
Lorna Simpson was born on August 13, 1960, and grew up in Queens and 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.
Education
Prior to receiving her BFA, Simpson traveled Europe, Africa, and the United States further developing her skills through documentary photography. 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.
Career
Simpson was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1985, and in 1990, she became one of 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
Work
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. 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."
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.
Easy for Who to Say, Simpson's work from 1989, displays 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. Also, the letters covering the faces suggest "intimate multiplicity of positions she might occupy and attitudes she might assume-", these potential thoughts are stopped, abruptly, by the words, "undermining not only the subjective position the figure would seek but also her grasp on any recognizable position at all."
In Simpson's 1989 work Guarded Conditions,she has assembled Polaroid images of a female model. The body is fragmented, viewed from behind, with the back of the model's head in a state of guardedness. Historical and symbolic associations of African-American hairstyles are also brought into play. The message of the text with the formal treatment of the images reinforce a sense of vulnerability. The poses are similar, differing slightly in the placement of feet, hair, and hands. These differences suggest, "the model's shifting relationship to herself." The fragmentation and serialization denies the body’s wholeness and individuality, confronting the viewer with histories of appropriation and consumption of the black female body.Many critics associate the work with the slave auction, as a reminder that black "enslaved women were removed from the circle of human suffering so that they might become circulating objects of sexual and pecuniary exchange." The women become objects, a subject that Simpson often makes the focus of her work.
Personal life
From 2007 until 2018, Simpson was married to fellow artist James Casebere. They have a daughter, Zora Casebere, an artist and Instagram personality.
Simpson shared a four-story studio with Casebere at 208 Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood from 2009 until 2018; the building was David Adjaye's first completed project in the US.
In 2014, Simpson spent a three-week residency at collector Pamela Joyner's Sonoma, California, estate. In 2018, she moved into a new studio at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The Adjaye building still served as archival and storage space, as well as a spot for hosting and entertaining guests, before it was put on the market in 2025 for $6.5 million.
Recognition
1985 – National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, United States
1987 – Workspace Grant, Jamaica Arts Center
1989 – Artists Space board of directors, New York, NY
1990 – Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, New York, NY
1994 – Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work, College Art Association, New York, NY
1997 – Artist-in-Residence Grant, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH
1998 – Finalist, Hugo Boss Prize 1998, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, NY
2001 – Whitney Museum of American Art Award, sponsored by Cartier and the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, New York, NY
2003 – Distinguished Artist-In-Residence, Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY
2014 – Shortlisted, Deutsche Börse Photography Prize
2018 – SMFA Medal Award, School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts Awardee, Boston, MA
2019 – Winner, J. Paul Getty Medal (along with Mary Beard and Ed Ruscha)
List of works
Stereo Styles. 1988. ten instant film pictures placed on engraved plastic. private collection.
ID. 1990. Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Back. 1991. 2 colour Polaroids and 3 plastic plaques.
Counting. 1991. photogravure and screenprint. Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Five Day Forecast. 1991. 5 photographs, gelatin silver print on paper and 15 engraved plaques. Tate Modern, London.
Untitled (What should fit here...). 1993. photo-etching, screenprint and hand-applied watercolor. Minneapolis Institute of Art.
lll (Three Wishbones in a Wood Box). 1994. wooden box containing three wishbones made of ceramic, rubber and bronze inserted in two felt pads. Minneapolis Institute of Art.
The Waterbearer. 1996. silver print.
Still. 1997. Pérez Art Museum Miami
Wigs (Portfolio). 1994. portfolio of twenty-one lithographs on felt with seventeen lithographed felt text panels. Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
Gestures/Reenactments. 1985. 6 photographs of a black man in white clothes, with text captions underneath.
Publications
Simon, Joan. "Lorna Simpson." New York: Prestel Publishing, 2013. Print.
Als, Hilton (2013). Lorna Simpson: Works on Paper. Aspen, CO: Aspen Art Museum Press. ISBN 9780934324632.
Momin, Shamim; Enwezor, Okwui; Simpson, Lorna; Posner, Helaine; Als, Hilton; Isaac Julien; Golden, Thelma (2006). Lorna Simpson. New York: Abrams, in association with the American Federation of Arts. ISBN 0-8109-5548-2.
Simpson, Lorna; Willis, Deborah; Grundberg, Andy (1992). Lorna Simpson. San Francisco: The Friends of Photography. ISBN 0-933286-60-0.
Simpson, Lorna; Wright, Beryl J.; Hartman, Saidiya V. (1992). Lorna Simpson: for the sake of the viewer. New York: Universe Pub. ISBN 0-87663-637-7.
Rogers-Lafferty, Sarah; Simpson, Lorna (1997). Lorna Simpson: interior/exterior, full/empty. Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts/The Ohio State University. ISBN 1-881390-17-9.
Gili, Marta (2002). Lorna Simpson. Ediciones Universidad Salamanca. ISBN 84-95719-08-8.
Jones, Kellie; Simpson, Lorna; Golden, Thelma; Iles, Chrissie; Beckwith, Naomi (2021). Lorna Simpson. London: Phaidon. ISBN 9781838661243..
Simpson, Lorna; Gili, Marta; Fernández-Cid, Miguel (2004). Compostela: Lorna Simpson: Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, 5 marzo - 30 maio 2004, Santiago de Compostela. Santiago de Compostela, Spain: Xunta de Galicia. ISBN 84-453-3752-1.