Counting, Captioning, Collaging: Lorna Simpson’s Deconstruction of the Visual Code
Lorna Simpson (b. August 13, 1960) has, over nearly four decades, forged a body of work that relentlessly interrogates how visual and linguistic systems shape our understanding of race, gender, memory, and desire. Raised in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, Simpson came of age amid the social upheavals of the 1970s and ’80s; when identity politics, feminist theory, and AIDS activism converged to redefine art’s social role. Her practice, which spans photography, screen‐printing, video, installation, and painting, repeatedly subverts conventional portraiture by isolating fragments (hair, necklines, captions) and deploying them to expose the hidden mechanisms by which Black women’s bodies are coded and constrained.
Simpson’s work is most often situated at the intersection of several late‐20th‐ and early‐21st‐century movements. Emerging alongside the rise of identity politics, she uses art to examine how race, gender, sexuality, and class are constructed and perceived . Her spare photo-text compositions and conceptual installations align her with Conceptual art, a tradition in which ideas and language take precedence over purely formal concerns . Simultaneously, Simpson’s critique of the “male gaze” and her centering of Black women’s experiences place her firmly within the feminist art movement, especially its second‐ and post–second‐wave currents that sought to rewrite art history from women’s perspectives. Though she keeps her personal orientation private, her strategic anonymity and fragmentary portraits resonate with queer feminist strategies, destabilizing binary definitions of gender and sexuality and opening spaces for more fluid embodiments.
Simpson’s formal training began at New York’s School of Visual Arts, where she earned a BFA in Photography in 1982, then continued at the University of California, San Diego, completing her MFA in 1985. These years coincided with major debates around representation in the art world: the rise of feminist art practice, the increasing visibility of queer voices, and the galvanizing impact of AIDS on cultural institutions. Simpson’s early experiments with combining photographic fragments and text, most notably in the “Stereo Styles” portfolio of 1988, reflect this context. In that suite of ten instant‐film images paired with single‐word descriptors like “Daring” and “Severe,” she omits her sitter’s face entirely, compelling viewers to confront how language and image together generate stereotype (Britannica; Wikipedia).
By 1991, Simpson’s work had grown in scale and complexity. In Counting (1991), she presented a monumental triptych of photogravure and screen‐print panels, each numbered, each refusing a fixed narrative, inviting reflection on how enumeration can become a form of objectification (Minneapolis Institute of Art; Wikipedia). In the same year, Five Day Forecast (1991), now in Tate Modern’s permanent collection, paired gelatin silver prints of a woman’s profile with engraved plaques, extending her critique of how institutional modes of display reinforce power dynamics (Tate Modern; Wikipedia).
The mid-1990s saw Simpson expand into installation with Wigs (1994), a landmark work comprising twenty-one black-and-white lithographs of wig styles printed on felt, interspersed with seventeen text panels. Here, she removes the human figure entirely, transforming wigs into “sole markers” by which viewers guess at race, gender, and identity, thus underscoring the performative aspects of self-fashioning (MoMA; Yale University Art Gallery). Simultaneously, her participation in ACT UP Art Box (1993–94) demonstrated her engagement with AIDS activism, deploying her sparse visual language to demand visibility and solidarity (MoMA).
Alongside these photographic and print works, Simpson developed video installations like Corridor (2003), which aligns a domestic scene of a household servant from 1860 with a parallel 1960 interior, performed by the same actress. By bridging a century of racial history in a single visual cadence, she reveals “subtle continuities” in domestic labor and memory that defy linear historical narratives (Lorna Simpson Studio; The Art Story).
In the past decade, Simpson has turned increasingly to painting and mixed-media collage, most notably in exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth and the 2025 Metropolitan Museum retrospective “Source Notes.” In Darkening (2018), ink washes over gesso conjure landscapes that echo both Turner’s seascapes and Chinese shan shui, layered with snippets of text and archival imagery to evoke the “fluid, constructed nature of history” (The New Yorker). Her recent Earth & Sky series (2024–25) weaves mineralogical diagrams and meteorite imagery into large canvases, suggesting cosmic dimensions to personal and collective memory (Hauser & Wirth; The New Yorker).
Central to Simpson’s practice is the interplay of absence and presence. By withholding faces, she creates spaces in which the viewer’s assumptions, about race, gender, sexuality, are made visible. Her use of terse captions or numbers further implicates language as both tool and trap, revealing how words can delimit as much as they illuminate (Lamm; Smith). Moreover, Simpson’s strategic anonymity resonates with queer feminist critiques of fixed identity categories: the wigs, necklines, and collage fragments refuse binary definitions and invite more fluid notions of selfhood.
Simpson’s influence is both institutional and scholarly. Her work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Tate Modern, and many others, and she has shaped subsequent generations of artists who interrogate intersectional identity through text-and-image strategies. Her collaborations with peers such as Carrie Mae Weems and her intergenerational dialogues, collaborating even with her daughter Zora Simpson Casebere, underscore her commitment to community and the ongoing evolution of her medium (The New Yorker).
Ultimately, Lorna Simpson’s oeuvre exemplifies a sustained, rigorous investigation into the politics of visibility. Whether through fragments of hair on felt, numbered photogravures, or ink-washed paintings, Simpson continues to challenge viewers to question the systems, visual, linguistic, institutional, that shape our understanding of bodies, histories, and desires. Her work not only chronicles a personal and cultural journey but provides vital conceptual tools for reimagining identity in the twenty-first century.
References:
Lorna Simpson. Britannica, Encyclopedia Britannica, 2 weeks ago, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lorna-Simpson.
Stereo Styles. Wikipedia, 1.9 years ago, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereo_Styles.
Counting. Minneapolis Institute of Art, https://collections.artsmia.org/art/21979/counting-lorna-simpson.
Five Day Forecast. Tate Modern, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/simpson-five-day-forecast-t06929.
Wigs. MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/73745.
Wigs. Yale University Art Gallery, https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/78206.
Corridor. Lorna Simpson Studio, 2003, https://lsimpsonstudio.com/films/corridor-2003.
How Lorna Simpson Broke the Frame. The New Yorker, 12 May 2025, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/05/12/lorna-simpson-profile.
In an Upcoming Show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lorna Simpson Goes Straight to the Source. Vogue, 10 Mar. 2025, https://www.vogue.com/article/metropolitan-museum-lorna-simpson.
Lamm, Kimberly. Portraits of the Past, Imagined Now. In Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom, edited by Kimberly Lamm, pp. 122–24. University of California Press, 2008.
Smith, Cherise. Fragmented Documents: Works by Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Willie Robert Middlebrook. Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 24, no. 2 (1999): 249–72.
Fascinating as usual Dr Rogue, as I gear up for my open studio in a few months and get the typical flashbacks of silly questions that sometimes come on opening night, your work always reminds me that there is more depth of appreciation out there than I sometimes think! Thank you 🙏🏻