One of
the leading artists of her generation, Lorna Simpson came to prominence in the
mid-1980s through her photographic and textual works that confronted and
challenged conventional attitudes toward race, gender, and cultural memory with
a potent mixture of formal elegance and conceptual rigor. Since the late 1990s,
Simpson has extended these concerns into a series of film and video
installations and large-scale photographic works printed on felt.
Lorna
Simpson: Works on Paperhighlights
a recent body of work that explores the complex relationship between the
photographic archive and processes of self-fashioning. As in Simpson’s earlier
works, these new drawings and collages take the African-American woman as a
point of departure, continuing her longstanding examination of the ways that
gender and culture shape the experience of life in our contemporary multiracial
society. This will be the first museum exhibition dedicated to Simpson’s
drawings and collages—including a new series of works created during her tenure
as the Aspen Art Museum’s 2013 Jane and Marc Nathanson Distinguished Artist in
Residence—and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated, scholarly catalogue.
Lorna
Simpson’s Jane and Marc Nathanson Distinguished Artist in Residence residency
and exhibition are organized by the Aspen Art Museum and funded by Jane and
Marc Nathanson with additional support from Rona and Jeffrey Citrin.
Publication underwritten with major support from Toby Devan Lewis. General
exhibition support is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual
Arts. Exhibition lectures are presented as part of the Questrom Lecture Series
and educational outreach programming is made possible by the Questrom Education
Fund.
ARTIST
BIO
Lorna Simpson (born 1960, Brooklyn, New York) received her BFA in Photography
from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her MFA from the University of
California, San Diego. Her work has been widely collected and exhibited by such
institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis; Studio Museum, Harlem; and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin;
among others. In 2006–07, her mid-career survey was exhibited at the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Miami Art Museum; Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts; and Gibbes Museum of Art in
Charleston, South Carolina. Simpson’s exhibition at the AAM coincides with her
first major European retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
The Conceptual Artist Travels Back in Time For Her Surreal New Film
Artist Lorna Simpson conjures a childhood memory for a pirouette-filled film that ran May 13 to June 18, 2011 at her representative gallery, Salon 94. Coated in gold body paint and accessorized with matching afros, the ballet corps starring in Momentum comprises a group of New York dancers handpicked by the Brooklyn native to reenact her own stage debut at the age of eleven. "I was very surprised by a powerful sense of reversal while performing," she recalls. "I had this intense urge to occupy the role of observer, as opposed to being immersed in my well-rehearsed effort. I [wanted] to satisfy my need to be the spectator of this performance." Alongside the video installation, two large-scale felt works silk-screened in gold ink and depicting 1970s postcards of New York’s Lincoln Center, the venue of the original performance, are also on show. The pioneering conceptual photographer, who has shown at the Whitney, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Walker Art Center, revisits themes of gender, cultural identity and history in her work: a recent series for the Brooklyn Museum saw Simpson recreate vintage 1950s images of African Americans with herself as the subject.
“Gathered,” Lorna Simpson's elegantly installed solo show at the Brooklyn Museum, appears minimal at first. Two pieces sprawl down one long, high-ceilinged gallery, leaving it mostly empty; a video hugs the far wall of an adjacent space. But together those pieces include nearly five hundred elements, most of them photographs, both appropriated and original. A cloud-like constellation of very small bronze-framed images -- vintage photo-booth portraits of African-Americans -- is installed alongside brushy black-ink abstractions and solid blocks of bronze that appear to mark absent figures. Another, larger work mixes found black-and-white photographs, taken in 1957, of a young black woman posing coquettishly, as if for a pinup magazine, with photographs Simpson took of herself as a pert, playful doppelganger, in the same poses. Hung together in a long, staggered grid, these images confuse past and present, artist and model, truth and illusion. As usual, Simpson is meditating on black history, identity, and gender roles, but as her work evolves it also opens up -- it gets richer and more engaging.
~
Lorna Simpson: Gathered / January 28 - August 21, 2011 / Brooklyn Museum
