The next Artist You Need To Know is Lorna Simpson.
Simpson (born 1960) is an American artist who works in a variety of media, but with a focus on photography as her primary studio. She’s exhibited around the United States as well as internationally and became known in the 1980s – 1990s with her installation work that combined photography and text. Simpson’s artworks intersect with issues of identity, gender, race, history and representation. She is an extremely diverse artist in her choice of media, working in not just photography but also film, video, painting, drawing, audio, and sculpture.
From Hauser & Wirth (to mark a massive retrospective of her work): “Simpson is part of a generation of artists who used conceptual approaches to undermine the assumed credibility and apparent neutrality of established language and images.”
Simpson was born and raised in Queens and Brooklyn, New York in the United States : she attended the High School of Art and Design and took courses at the Art Institute of Chicago while visiting her grandmother there. Her heritage is both Jamaican-Cuban father and African-American and her parents encouraged her interest in arts and culture when she was a child, taking her to many plays, museums, concerts and dance performances as a child.
Before earning a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in NYC (1982), Simpson traveled extensively around both the US but also Europe and Africa, focusing on her documentary photography skills. While obtaining her undergraduate degree, she also worked at the Studio Museum of Harlem. She would go on to get an MFA from the University of California at San Diego (1985) : there she moved from primarily painting (her BFA was in that area) to more of an exploration of photography and conceptual art. At this time, her recognizable style of incorporating text with portraiture began to take shape. This action was informed by her own earlier work in documentary photography and her questioning of the explicit and implicit biases of ‘documentary photography’, especially as it pertained to considering the stereotypes, assumptions and other contested narratives about African-American women within both the past and present of the cultural discourse in the United States.
Some of her teachers during her MFA included Allan Kaprow and previously featured Artist You Need To Know Eleanor Antin.
She has had a career filled with awards and recognition. Simpson has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1985 and 1990, respectively) and was among one of the first African-American women to be an exhibitor at the Venice Biennale as well as being the first African-American woman to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Simpson has had one woman shows at the Denver Art Museum and the Portland Art Museum among many others. An important touchstone of her career was her inclusion The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (which was on view at The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Studio Museum in Harlem).
Simpson’s artworks can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago); the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis); Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; and Haus der Kunst (Munich, Germany) amongst many others.
For a more complete listing of her accomplishments (including several publications she’s produced) you can visit her site and see her CV here.
“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.”
In this respect, Simpson’s artwork shares common ground with two previously featured Artists You Need To Know : Faith Ringgold and Betye Saar.
Simpson’s work is not just important in gallery and academic spaces, but lives within and draws upon pop culture and larger conversations. Considering this, her work with Essence Magazine in a photo shoot with Barbadian singer, businesswoman and actress Rihanna (in 2021) is a fine example of her art, aesthetics and political stance within contemporary pop culture frameworks. That can be seen here.
You can see more of Simpson’s artwork at her site : she has an extensive archive of her many works there. A fine article at Artsy offers a nuanced look at her work, placing it in an historical context that both draws upon her family history as well as the larger social sites of the United States from her time growing up to now. That can be enjoyed here.