Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson
Simpson in April 2009
Born	Lorna Simpson 1960 (1960) Brooklyn, New York
Nationality	American
Education	University of California-San Diego, MFA, 1985; School of Visual Arts, New York City, BFA, 1983
Known for	Photography, Film, Video
Movement	Conceptual photography
Awards	2010 ICP Infinity Award in Art, International Center of Photography, New York City

External image

Black America Again (album cover)

Lorna Simpson (born 1960) is an African-American photographer and multimedia artist who made her name in the 1980s and 1990s with artworks such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal. She is one of the leading artists of her generation (to much critical acclaim), and her works have been included in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally.

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1960, she attended the High School of Art and Design and the School of Visual Arts in New York where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography. After receiving her BFA, she traveled to Europe and Africa, developing skills in documentary photography, her earliest works. While traveling, she became inspired to expand her work beyond the field of photography in order to challenge and engage the viewer.

It was these ideas that she worked on while earning her Master's of Fine Arts degree from the University of California at San Diego in 1985. Her education in San Diego was somewhere between Photography and Conceptual art, and her teachers included conceptualist Allan Kaprow, performance artist Eleanor Antin, filmmakers Babette Mangolte and Jean-Pierre Gorin and poet David Antin. What emerged was her signature style of "photo-text", in which graphic text is inserted into studio-like portraiture, bringing new conceptual meaning into the works. These works generally related to the perception of African-American women within American culture.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Simpson was showing work through solo exhibitions all over the country, and her name was synonymous with photo-text artworks. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1985, and in 1990, she became the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. In 1990, Simpson had one woman exhibitions at several major museums, including the Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado, the Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Simpson has explored various media and techniques, including two-dimensional photographs as well as silk screening her photographs on large felt panels, creating installations, or producing as video works such as Call Waiting (1997).