Lorna Simpson – Autonomous mix of photography and concept art
Lorna Simpson was born in Brooklyn, New York City on 13 August 1960. Her parents took her to theatre performances, museum visits, concerts and ballet evenings from an early age, laying the foundations for her growing interest in art. She took art classes when she visited her grandmother in the summer, and in 1982 earned her bachelor's degree in painting at the School of Visual Arts in New York. During her studies, she completed an internship at the Studio Museum in Harlem and was able to observe the work of David Hammons, who was working there at the time. In 1985, she graduated with a master's degree in fine arts from the University of California in San Diego where her teachers had included the filmmakers Babette Mangolte and Jean-Pierre Gorin, the performance artist Eleanor Antin, the poet David Antin and the conceptual artist Allan Kaprow. Lorna Simpson meandered between photography and conceptual art and developed her characteristic style of ‘photo-text’, for which she inserted graphic elements into studio-like portraits, in which she usually cut off the heads.
Diverse experiments with writing, images and film
Following her studies, Lorna Simpson travelled to Europe and Africa and experimented with street photography. She found her defining themes in the big questions of identity, gender and ethnicity. She repeatedly scrutinised traditional roles and representations in her work, and documentary photography also had to endure the critical question of the extent to which it actually documented reality or merely constructed it on the vague basis of each person's own subjectivity. Simpson experimented with various media, applied photographs and screen prints to large-format felt panels, conceived installations and video works, and even made her first films in the 1990s, which always featured people with non-white skin colour. However, her most important means of expression remained her word pictures, for which she added texts to her photographs, with writers such as Langston Hughes, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Ntozake Shange amongst the artists who influenced her work.
An internationally celebrated pioneer of Afro-American art
In 1990, Lorna Simpson was the first African-American artist to be invited to the prestigious Biennale di Venezia, and she was also the first African-American woman to hold a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Lorna Simpson has received prizes and honours for her art, including a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1985 and the Whitney Museum of Art Award in 2001. She has been a member of the National Academy of Design since 2013, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2016, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 2021. She was also nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998, but lost out to Scottish video artist Douglas Gordon.
Lorna Simpson was married to the photographer James Casebere from 2007 to 2018, with whom she had a daughter, and lives today in Brooklyn.
Lorna Simpson - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
