Lorna Simpson: ‘Anything that I would do would be Black with the capital B’

When Lorna Simpson was finishing graduate school at the University of California, San Diego in the mid 1980s, she was taking photographs, although ‘not necessarily expecting to have an art career.’ In large part, that is because after defending her thesis project in front of her professors, ‘no one had anything to say,’ she tells me over Zoom. But whether those around her possessed the references to engage with her work or not, she had already made up her mind about her future: ‘Anything that I would do would be Black with the capital B.’

Now, nearly 40 years later, Simpson is regarded as a pioneering conceptual artist, fluent in a variety of formats, including but not at all restricted to the photographic image. Her multidisciplinary practice explores complex themes rooted in questions of identity and memory, at once emotional and cerebral. Gestures and Reenactments (1985), the aforementioned graduate project, is a gorgeous set of six large silver gelatin prints depicting the toned upper body of a brown-skinned man sheathed in a crisp white T-shirt, juxtaposed with texts that are both playful and provocative. It announced the arrival of a serious talent and, in retrospect, held a mirror to the pervading culture: to not have anything to say about the work was itself a devastating admission.

Lack of response is a problem Simpson no longer has. At Hauser & Wirth Zurich, she is debuting new works from her ‘Special Character’ series (2019–ongoing), on view until December 22. For years, Simpson has collected back issues of Ebony magazine, which she finds and buys in bulk on Etsy and eBay. Combing through thousands of pages, patterns emerge, and she compiles composite portraits of the black women she finds peering out. The resulting layered silkscreen collages, some up to 3.3 meters wide by 2.4 meters tall, interrogate and amplify that impenetrable facade of self-presentation, as well as the timeless guile of interpersonal inscrutability.

There is a profundity in contemplating the provenance of these portraits rooted in the specific medium of glossy 20th-century magazines – which were very deliberately aimed at a middle-class Black readership – in terms of the repurposed format they now take on in Switzerland. Speaking across the continental divide between Simpson’s home in Brooklyn and mine in Paris, I ask her about the scale of difference measured in geography, ethnicity, and class, between these pictures’ original viewership and the newer audiences that will encounter them in Europe. ‘It’s a beautiful thing,’ she answers. ‘Even in my own experience of traveling and looking at art, the amazing thing is to be able to see what you had not had the opportunity to see before, that which comes from a different point of view.’

Simpson’s skin is dark brown and flawless, her demeanor calm and gracious. It is hard to believe this is the fourth decade of her prolific artistic practice. I am curious about her views on the larger shifts that have occurred, not just in the art industry but in the wider American culture, too – both across the span of her career and more recently, since the racial reckoning of the summer of 2020. Was there a clearly delineated ‘before’ and ‘after’ the death of George Floyd, I wonder? And if so, have any of the calls to change since then amounted to lasting progress, or were they merely fleeting?

Before I finish the question, Simpson mentions a recent interview in The New York Times Magazine with the co-founder of Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner. Speaking about his book, The Masters, Wenner defended his decision only to publish interviews with white male musicians with some particularly eyebrow-raising comments widely perceived to be dismissive of non-whites and women. ‘It’s not surprising,’ Simpson tells me. ‘I think that sentiment and belief system is in operation. It’s a constant slippage of rights, and slippage of respect. There’s this constant erosion that threatens to just wipe us all out.’ Of the summer of 2020, she expands, ‘Everyone remembers that moment, it’s now [about] how they respond to it.’ In terms of the art world specifically, ‘there’s two ways to look at it: There is a cultural evolution, and then there’s a market. Over the past, I don't know how many years, there’s been a growing market for the work of Black artists. So that need or market is driven by demands.’

Yet without significant long-term investment in artists’ careers, Simpson worries that young minority artists without independent means may find themselves like hamsters on the proverbial treadmill, chasing every invitation but going nowhere fast, unable to take risks or to simply say ‘no’ to things when they need to. These pressures have implications for artists’ ability to produce the kind of risk-taking work upon which lasting reputations are made.

‘The bar is so high,’ Simpson says. ‘I think there’s a realization that there is a lot of interest and big opportunities, but sometimes the way the opportunities come and the way that they’re expressed is shitty.’ In turn, because some artists – and here Simpson stresses she’s not making a blanket statement – feel that pressure, ‘they won’t negotiate in their own best interest. They will negotiate in a way to be able to take advantage of the opportunity. Sometimes, over a course of years, that can become a crash and burn situation.’

Simpson expresses gratitude for the generational differences that, in retrospect, it is clear she has enjoyed. She confesses that while she had no mentors to speak of, she did come of age in a far more forgiving tuitional context. Before even receiving her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in her native New York City, she maxed out her student loans to pay for months of undirected travel around Europe and North Africa, taking photographs and marveling at the sheer scale and diversity of the world. Travel became her mentor and muse, and she developed a rich and singular sensibility before there was ever a question about selling it.

‘When I look back now,’ she says, ‘my view was much more long-range.’ That discipline and perspective has paid off generously.

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Lorna Simpson is represented by Hauser & Wirth. Her exhibition at the gallery’s Limmatstrasse location in Zurich is on view through December 22, 2023.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Self-Portrait in Black and White (2019), a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and a visiting professor of the humanities at Bard College.

Published on October 6, 2023.

Caption for full-bleed images: Studio of Lorna Simpson, 2023. © Lorna Simpson. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photographs by James Wang.