1. Lorna Simpson came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with photo-text installations such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal that questioned the nature of identity, gender, race, history and representation.
22 Facts About Lorna Simpson
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Lorna Simpson was born on August 13,1960, and grew up in Queens and Brooklyn, New York.
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Lorna Simpson attended the High School of Art and Design and took courses at the Art Institute of Chicago in summer while visiting her grandmother.
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Lorna Simpson attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting in 1982.
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Lorna Simpson earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California at San Diego in 1985.
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Lorna Simpson's focus was between Photography and Conceptual art, and her teachers included Allan Kaprow, Eleanor Antin, filmmakers Babette Mangolte, Jean-Pierre Gorin and poet David Antin.
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Lorna Simpson was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1985, and in 1990, she became one of the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale.
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Lorna Simpson was the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art with her Projects 23 exhibition.
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In 1990, Lorna Simpson had one woman exhibitions at several major museums, including the Denver Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.
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In 1997, Lorna Simpson received the Artist-in-Residence grant from the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, where she exhibited her works in photography.
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Lorna Simpson has been one of a handful of African-American artists to exhibit at the Jamaica Arts Center in Queens, New York and then to the gallery in Soho.
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Lorna Simpson first exhibited paintings in 2015 at the 56th Venice Biennale, followed by a showing at the Salon 94 Bowery.
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In 2016 Lorna Simpson created the album artwork for Black America Again by Common.
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Lorna Simpson's work is included in the Afrofuturist Period Room exhibition Before Yesterday We Could Fly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
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Lorna Simpson's goal is to continue to influence the legacy of black artists by speaking with artists and activists such as the Art Hoe Collective.
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Lorna Simpson began working in film in 1997 with Call Waiting.
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Lorna Simpson incorporated the complicated relationship that African American women have with their natural hair in her work Wigs.
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Lorna Simpson juxtaposed found, pinup-style images of young African American women from 1957 with present day photographs of herself reproducing the model's pose, clothing and backdrop.
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Lorna Simpson thus recreated a narrative of beauty ideals that excluded black women in the 1950s.
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Artists that have influenced Lorna Simpson's work include David Hammons, Adrian Piper, and Felix-Gonzalex Torres; and writers like Ishmael Reed, Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison because of their rhythmical voice.
21.
From 2007 until 2018, Lorna Simpson was married to fellow artist James Casebere.
22.
Lorna Simpson shared a four-story studio with Casebere from 2009 until 2018; the building was David Adjaye's first completed project in the US.