Background
Lorna Simpson was born on August 13, 1960, in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States.
245 E 56th St, New York, NY 10022, United States
Lorna attended the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, New York City.
209 E 23rd St, New York, NY 10010, United States
In 1983, Simpson received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photography from the School of Visual Arts.
9500 Gilman Dr, La Jolla, CA 92093, United States
In 1985, Simpson obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California, located in San Diego.
245 E 56th St, New York, NY 10022, United States
Lorna attended the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, New York City.
209 E 23rd St, New York, NY 10010, United States
In 1983, Simpson received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photography from the School of Visual Arts.
9500 Gilman Dr, La Jolla, CA 92093, United States
In 1985, Simpson obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California, located in San Diego.
Lorna Simpson was born on August 13, 1960, in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States.
Initially, Lorna attended the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, New York City. Later, she continued her education at the School of Visual Arts, also in Manhattan, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photography in 1983.
After graduation from the School of Visual Arts, Simpson left for Europe and Africa. During her traveling, she improved her skills in documentary photography. Also, it was during that period of time, that Lorna decided to expand her work beyond the field of photography in order to challenge her viewers and help them to engage in her works.
In 1985, Simpson obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California, located in San Diego. There, among her well-known mentors were Allan Kaprow, Eleanor Antin, Babette Mangolte, Jean-Pierre Gorin and David Antin. Also, during the period of studies at the educational establishment, Lorna developed her own distinct style, known as "photo-text". In her "photo-text" works, Simpson inserts graphic text into studio-like portraiture.
During the 1980's and 1990's, Lorna exhibited her works in solo shows in the United States, and her name was synonymous with "photo-text" artworks. In 1990, Simpson held her solo exhibitions at several leading museums, including the Denver Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The same year, in 1990, she took part in the Venice Biennale, an international arts festival. Also, during that period of time, Lorna's works were included in the exhibition, entitled "The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980's", represented by several museums.
Also, in the 1990's, Simpson took the themes of sexuality and desire by representing the sites of unseen public sexual encounters in works, such as "The Rock" (1995). She printed these large-scale photographic tableaux on felt, instead of photographic paper, and by doing so, not only lent the images a tactility, that serves to enhance their illicit and voyeuristic subject matter, but also challenged viewers' assumptions, regarding the medium of photography itself.
By the end of 1992, the figure had started to disappear from Simpson's work. At that time, she mainly focused on wide-ranging aesthetic issues. However, during that time, Lorna continued to keep up her interest in human body, but she didn't depict it in her works.
By the 2000's, Simpson had begun to explore the medium of video installations. One such work, Corridor (2003), juxtaposed the stories of two African-American women — an American Civil War-era runaway slave and a bored mid-20th-century housewife — and drew parallels between their lives of isolation.
In 2003, Lorna was a distinguished artist-in-residence at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. Later, in 2007, her works were exhibited at a 20-year retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
In 2015, Lorna showed a series of multi-paneled paintings at the 56th Venice Biennale. The pieces, notably "Three Figures" (2014), featured manipulated photographs, overlaid with ink and acrylic. In subsequent years, she exhibited additional paintings, as well as sculptures and a series of collages, titled "Unanswerable" (2018). The collages considered the representation of African-American women by assembling photographs from vintage Jet and Ebony magazines to create absurd juxtapositions. Also, in 2017, Lorna made the album artwork for Black America Again by Common, an American rapper, actor and philanthropist.
Throughout her career, Lorna's works were showed in different museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Miami Art Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and many others.
Currently, Lorna lives and works in Brooklyn, New York City.
Lorna Simpson is a well-known photographer and artist, who first gained prominence for her large works, that matched photography and text and defied traditional conceptions of sex, identity, race, culture, history and memory. Her most famous works include "Guarded Conditions", "Square Deal", "Stereo Styles" and others.
She became the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale in Italy and also the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Also, Lorna was made one of a handful of African-American artists to exhibit at the Jamaica Arts Center in Queens, New York.
During her lifetime, Simpson received many awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1985 and 1990, Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 1990, Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work in 1994, Whitney Museum of American Art Award in 2001 and others.
Today, her works are kept in the collections of different museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Miami Art Museum, among others.
Lorna's works are influenced by such artists, as David Hammons, Adrian Piper and Felix-Gonzalex Torres. Moreover, some writers, as Ishmael Reed, Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison also had their impact on her oeuvre.
Using African-American women as her models and sometimes African American men, Simpson creates tableaux, that utilize repetition and pictorial framing to challenge cultural and historical conceptions of gender and race. The figures are often shown from behind or in fragments, with their hands or heads cropped from the frame of the photograph. In effect, this fragmentation draws attention to the historical depersonalization and sexualization of black bodies.
Quotations:
"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."
"I do not feel as though issues of identity are exhaustible. I feel that my critique of identity, which in the past work may be the most obvious, becomes the foreground or recedes, given the structures of the text or the type of narrative, that I impose on the work."
"Real is a contentious word. What can be considered real and or verified does not necessarily mean that it is recognized or acknowledged on a micro or macro level. There are many different ways to interrogate or locate a subject. One should take into account the lens by which we think of the idea of a subject."
"I focus on details, either of the body, or of objects, that represent gender, sexuality and other themes."
"The only thing I can hope the viewer will get from the work is something about the structure of the work. It would be asking too much, I think, for them to get my exact intention. But if — through the construct of language, the way things are juxtaposed — there is some sort of disruption of the way you would normally go about reaching photographic images... if that is happening, that's fine."
"The construction of femininity is a construction, yes, but also it can be twisted and turned around in such a way, that doesn't necessarily mean it is pointing to the female body or male body in such a binary fashion. The culture is already there and has always been, but not as equal citizens. I think there is more progress to come."
"Reading about feminism, when I was a teenager and seeing it as a young woman, I realized, that feminism really hadn't dealt with sexuality; it really hadn't dealt with transgender or gay women."
"I started to concentrate more upon how the viewer looks at photographs... I would insert my own text or my own specific reading of the image to give the viewer something they might not interpret or surmise, due to their educated way of looking at images, and reading them for their emotional, psychological, and/or sociological values. So I would start to interject these things, that the photograph would not speak of, and that I felt needed to be revealed, but that couldn't be revealed from just looking at an image."
Lorna is married to James Casebere, a photographer. The couple has one daughter, whose name is Zora Casebere, a beauty blogger.
