Artists

Lorna Simpson received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. She emerged from graduate school in 1985 already recognized as a pioneer of conceptual photography, and gained wider prominence in the early 1990s for large-scale photograph-and-text works that challenge conventional views of gender, identity, culture, and memory. Using unidentified figures as a visual point of departure, Simpson examines how race, gender, and culture shape lived experience in contemporary America. Over the following decades, her practice expanded across multi-panel felt photographs, film, video installation, collage, painting, and ink works — with characteristic ambivalence running through each medium. Her large-scale video works, including Cloudscape and Momentum, extend her persistent inquiry into representation and recollection, while her more recent ink wash paintings return to and deepen the exploration of isolated figures in nebulous, open-ended spaces.

Simpson's work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum (Hugo Boss Prize), Documenta XI, and the 56th Venice Biennale, and is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Glenstone, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. She has been awarded the J. Paul Getty Medal, the Joyce Alexander Wein Prize, and the Infinity Award in Art. Simpson is represented by Hauser & Wirth.