I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed American artist, Lorna Simpson.

Working across photography to painting, video to collage, Simpson is a multimedia artist who – since the 1980s – has gained widespread acclaim for her pioneering approach to conceptual photography. Whether it’s fusing text with image, obscuring her subject’s identity, using techniques such as repetition, collage or manipulation – Simpson has conjured a plethora of ways to reinvent the image, and, by doing so, raises questions about gender, race, memory, and history. Her work, mostly centred on the female body, is full of seemingly open-ended narratives – as she has said: “I think the idea of identity or persona is interesting to me in that it is malleable and fluid. And that has always been part of the work in terms of [thinking about] who gets to determine who we are. Do we get to determine that, and what are the parameters of that, given the society that we live in?”

Engaging with found images and objects, whether that be cut-outs from Ebony or Jet Magazines, or photographs she finds on eBay, which she melds with inks or collages of jewels, Simpson has continuously reconfigured what painting and photography means.

Born in 1960, and raised in Queens and Brooklyn in a childhood that put the arts first, Simpson received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and following that, an MFA from the University of California San Diego, where she began to focus on the portraits of Black women she found in magazines, adding suggestive phrases from elsewhere.

By 1990, she had a major exhibition at MoMA, and throughout the decades has continued to push boundaries with her seemingly limitless approach to materials. But in 2015, she turned to painting, showing her first nine-feet-tall canvases at the Venice Biennale, and this month will present a major exhibition – that considers the entirety of her painting practice – at the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York – where we are recording today.

Titled “Source Notes”, it will feature Simpson’s monumental and spellbinding paintings, which, steeped in monochromatic blues, silvers, blacks and greys, appear in settings that evoke the cosmological or natural world. An extension of her photographic work, Simpson’s paintings see the manipulated figure and body pressed into landscapes akin to waterfalls or meteorites, and I can’t wait to find out more…

https://lsimpsonstudio.com/

Lorna Simpson: Source Notes – 

https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/lorna-simpson-source-notes?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=&utm_term=lorna%20simpson%20art&utm_content=39536&mkwid=s&pcrid=743882408399&pmt=b&pkw=lorna%20simpson%20art&pdv=c&slid=&product=&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22399716678&gbraid=0AAAAADmlGN7UtMbglt7UAR4dicGAOa9Vx&gclid=CjwKCAjw24vBBhABEiwANFG7ywIA72_JjPaxVUdfQSWW_h8NFYNWzddlSHz6KV38M9zgiG4rs_9UNxoCVFkQAvD_BwE

https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/2860-lorna-simpson/

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Sound editing by Mikaela Carmichael

Music by Ben Wetherfield