Lorna Simpson,Redhead, 2018. Single-channeldigital animation video, 8 seconds on loop. © LornaSimpson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis will showcase two video animations on September 3–February 13, 2022, by the prominent artist Lorna Simpson that focus on African Americans' identity, representation, politics, and culture.
Simpson is an African-American photographer and multimedia artist who explores representation, identity, gender, race, and history in her works. Born in New York in 1960, she studied photography at the School of Visual Arts and received an MFA from the University of California San Diego.
She rose in prominence in the 1980s and 1990s as the first African American woman to have her work shown at the Venice Biennale, the most prestigious art exhibition in the world. Simpson was also a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998, which recognizes the most outstanding and influential contemporary art in our time. Recently, she photographed Rihanna for the cover of Essence magazine's January/February issue.
Simpson is known for her works such as Guarded Conditions (1980), which explores the violence and oppression of African-American women in contemporary society. Other works such as Wigs (1994) dissect the complicated relationship African-American women have with wigs.
These same issues of African-American life are the focus of her video animation Heads. Heads is a collage of cut-up images from Ebony and Jet magazines from the 1950s–1970s. Those two magazines, in particular, focused on the lifestyles, culture, and politics of African Americans. Simpson cuts up these images, repurposes them, and accompanies them with drawings. Heads provides representation of Black life that discovers what it means to be Black and constantly perceived and judged by others in American history.
Lorna Simpson,Blue Love, 2020. Single-channeldigital animation video, 8 seconds on loop.© LornaSimpson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
When Wassan Al-Khudhairi, chief curator of CAM, saw Simpson posting her collages as moving images on Instagram, she got the idea to scale them larger. Simpson agreed, and they decided that Blue Love (2020) and Redhead (2018) were the two they would choose to display.
Al-Khudhairi has been a huge fan of Simpson's work, which she describes as a way to explore and break down the experiences of Black people and how they are perceived by others.
“The Black body fragmented is a very prevalent thing in American culture,” Al-Khudhairi says. “And so I think she is interested in engaging with these notions of fragmentation and how that ends up affecting or impacting the way bodies are regulated, the way people perceive themselves and perceive others.”
Lorna Simpson’s Heads will be on Street Views at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis from September 3–February 13, 2022, and admission is free.
