Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson works in a hulking tower in Brooklyn Navy Yard, New York, where from the 1810s to the 1960s ships were built for the US Navy. From its ninth floor, the sprawl of bridge piers and warehouses looks like a tiny film set, the cloudless sky behind curving crisply over the East River into blue haze.

It was mid-morning when I arrived, but the city felt just to be waking, hunkered and subdued in the wake of the previous day’s presidential election. “We were bracing ourselves,” Lorna told me later. “It felt quite feverish last night when I was walking to get some dinner. Because if Trump didn’t win there’d be a backlash, but if he did, well, it’s also horrible. We’re devastated. Everything is at risk. I don’t know what people were thinking. But he only gets four years.”

To enter the studio, you pass through a vestibule of high-grain wood. The workroom beyond is large and semi-divided into three, with huge windows along one wall. A flock of jugs, vases and other ceramic bits sits huddled on the long sill, grouped by colour; Lorna began collecting them from thrift stores in the 1980s. She loves vessels, and for years these have travelled with her from house to house, though recently she began to give them away. “If there’s one that catches your attention, please take it,” she said, laughing. Encircling us in the middle space were trolleys crammed with squeezy bottles and brushes, and neat stacks of mid-century magazines and 1800s book illustrations; on either side were two areas covered in loops of pigment spatter.

Lorna turned 64 last year, though she looks a decade younger. She is five foot six, with magnetic brown eyes and the fluid poise of a dancer (“As a child there was the thought that I would be a dancer, but never seriously”). Today she is dressed in yoga leggings, a T-shirt and an oversized fluffy cardigan. An exhibition of her recent work had opened at Hauser & Wirth gallery on West 22nd Street the previous evening. “I really feel good about it,” she said. “It really came out well.”

For 30 years, Lorna has been creating conceptual artworks that zero in on identity, race, gender and the nature of representation. She is perhaps best known for those she has made with photographs, from the startling combinations of staged images and text with which she rose to prominence in the late 1980s to the collage pieces she began producing in the mid-1990s – Lorna’s series Ebony and Riunite & Ice, for instance, use old Ebony and Jet magazines of her grandmother’s, but Lorna has replaced the Black models’ upswept hair with ink swirls and glittering crystal formations.

Her practice has expanded to include video, drawing, sculpture, installation and, most recently, painting – a shift she made in 2014, and one which shocked her a little, she told me. “But there can often be, in the making of the work, a discomfort and unease and a feeling that this doesn’t feel like something that I, Lorna, would do. But there is a part of me that doesn’t mind being uncomfortable. That’s where the commitment lies.” In May, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will present its first survey of her paintings, Lorna Simpson: Source Notes. The day before our meeting at the Navy Yard, we had spent the morning at Hauser & Wirth, where 10 of them – from her most recent series, Earth & Sky – were on display. Some were 12 feet tall. Most depicted meteorites, but two were of the patterns made by a spray of bullets: Unnatural Constellations, Lorna calls them.

To make the paintings, she explained, she transferred silkscreen prints of manipulated found images – from sources including a 1929 book, Minerals from Earth and Sky, about meteorites, gems and precious stones – onto huge fibreglass boards, then “painted an atmosphere around them”. She used the same technique for the powerful blue-hued polar landscapes and portraits that she first presented at Hauser & Wirth in 2019, some of which, like the meteorites, will be in the Met show. Lorna loves blue, which “has a significance across cultures, and so many different meanings”. For a minute she imagined she would use blue for the meteorites. “I thought, Let me just try one. I mean, what’s it gonna hurt? And I did, and I was like, OK, that’s horrible!”

She settled instead on grey, black, brown and silver – beautiful in the play of light and shadow. The rocks appear to hover mid-plunge, snared in a field of gravity. They make for eerie, intoxicating viewing.

Lorna had often plundered the meteorite book for illustrations. She had been through it “a million times” before a page she had bookmarked years ago caught her eye again. It told the story of a meteorite discovered on land belonging to a white judge in Mississippi in 1922, the height of the Jim Crow era. This story opens the exhibition: a wall sculpture in pin-mounted resin letters, each casting a tiny shadow. But Lorna’s text adds the details of the Black sharecropper, Ed Bush, who found the meteorite, still warm to the touch.

Nearby, installed so that you have to walk around it, is a real meteorite the size of a newborn baby. Lorna bought it on eBay, and she described for me in some detail the markings to look for. “These – what look like dragged fingerprints – come as it’s passing through the atmosphere. They don’t all have that; it depends on their composition. But they’re typical to a certain type of meteorite. They’re also incredibly heavy – this weighs about 80 pounds – because they’re compressed and because of the iron in them. A rock from this planet would not be as heavy.

“Other kids wanted to be vets; I loved rocks,” she said, clocking the bemused look on my face. Since the exhibition opened, many people have confessed to her that same interest. “So I don’t feel quite so weird.”

The works have a monumentality you rarely see in painting, David Breslin, the curator of the forthcoming Source Notes show, told me by phone the following week – a scale found mainly in site-specific art and installations. “There’s a liberatory quality to the work that allows us each to try to get to know ourselves better through it,” he said. Breslin has known Lorna “artistically since forever, but it’s only in the last few years I’ve been lucky enough to know her personally.” One of the first times they met was at a birthday party. “She was helping out in the kitchen, making sure people were taken care of and happy,” he said. “And I remember wanting to speak to her and ending up quasi-bartending with her. There is this empathy and warmth that you don’t expect when the reputation of the work looms so large.”

Lorna was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960. Her parents, Elian (Jamaican-Cuban), a social worker who had immigrated in the late 1950s, and Eleanor (African American), a secretary, met at Wilberforce University in Ohio, a traditionally Black college. then moved to New York to immerse themselves in the city’s cultural scene. They took their only child to the theatre, exhibitions, and dance performances by the likes of Alvin Ailey and Mikhail Baryshnikov. “They created a monster in a way,” Lorna said, laughing, “but that was the whole point of New York for them.”

Was Lorna encouraged to have an opinion about the things she saw? “Not about culture, no. But my parents were also very political, so there was a lot of sitting at dinners and listening to their friends or my family – even my mother’s mother – talk about their political views and observations. So the idea of having your opinion about something was important from early on.”

Lorna studied photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and for a time she fell headlong for the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the photojournalist and co-founder of the Magnum picture agency. In pursuit of his “decisive moments”, she and her then boyfriend, the photographer Ernesto Bazan, took out the maximum student loan and over the summer holidays spent months travelling around Europe and North Africa (“It was a different time”).

The experience was, she told me, life-changing: “to have the privilege of just wandering and looking, kind of aimlessly – really living in places for long periods of time.” Bazan sought out every Magnum bureau, “and I would tag along, but it was very clear to me that often these photographers’ experience of a place or a war was at odds with, and would be ignored by, the journalists. I thought, Wow, what a waste – the lack of control. I was a little bit disillusioned with that. I began to ask myself, What are you doing with this thing, then, that you’ve spent so much time with?”

She graduated with a BFA in photography in 1982, but photojournalism had lost its shine. Instead, on the advice of the artist Carrie Mae Weems, who Lorna met during the period she was interning at the noted Studio Museum in Harlem and working as a graphic designer to make ends meet, she moved the following year to the West Coast to do an MFA at the University of California San Diego. Conceptual art was leading the field in Southern California, and Lorna soon hit on her signature combinations of text and staged photographs, which were cleverly designed to resist the way we ordinarily automatically process information in a picture by, for example, purposely concealing the subject’s identity or expression.

“But I didn’t have this sense of, like, OK, I just accomplished this work that’s really interesting and amazing. I felt like my success, the way that the work took off when I came back to New York, was a surprise.”

In 1990, just five years after graduating, she was awarded a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of its Projects series for emerging artists. She was not quite 30. Her parents, who had expressed concern about how she would support herself as an artist, got to see it, “and that was huge validation,” Lorna told me. In the exhibition she presented photographs that were ostensibly portraits but showed only a detail of the body, such as an arm or a back – never the face – confounding the mechanism by which we habitually “read” a photograph, and paired them with loaded words and phrases underscoring how women, especially Black women, are classified and analysed by society.

Organic expression is one of the things that makes Lorna’s career so interesting. “It’s hard for her to stay in one place artistically,” Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum and Lorna’s close friend, said when we spoke by phone in December. “What she has done is continually allowed herself to travel, to move, to have the work unfold.”

The incident that arguably gave Lorna the final push into painting was strange, to say the least. It happened in Sonoma, California, where she was staying in a cottage belonging to the art collector Pamela J Joyner. “I was going through an exhausting divorce [from the artist and photographer James Casebere],” Lorna said, “and I needed to get out of New York for a minute.” She had been using ink on some of the collages, “and I had a moment: Should I scale this up? But having so many amazing artists who are painters in my life, I was like, Bitch, you are not a painter! It was as if I had to give myself permission – like, OK, it’s just an experiment – before I could begin.”

One night during her stay, at about 3am on 24 August 2014, a 6.0 earthquake hit the north San Francisco Bay region. It was, Lorna said, “the most terrifying thing; the sound was like a freight train. Of course, as a New Yorker my first thought was, Is somebody breaking in? And about a second later, Oh, that’s the earth moving! I was in a foetal position in the bed.

“It really shook everything up in a beautiful way that gave me the feeling of having more agency. Like, No, I can’t control everything, but I can make decisions about how I want things to go, either in terms of the art that I make or in my personal life. OK, I’m firing my lawyer! OK, let me make these paintings! And I did.”

Did it feel right straightaway? “Oh, no. It was, This is crazy!”

But Lorna turned out to be a very good painter indeed. The first half-dozen canvases she produced were chosen for the 2015 Venice Biennale by its curator, the late luminary Okwui Enwezor.

The artist Glenn Ligon, from whom Lorna sought encouragement when she began painting, told me by phone from Tribeca, New York, that “Lorna is one of those artists who is – just like she is in life – kind of fearless. Her starting to make paintings was a big deal. If you’ve been known for a certain kind of work, that’s a big risk, and she just went all in.” Ligon is Lorna’s exact age. They met on the art scene in early 1990s New York, when identity politics was at the fore. What was she like back then? I ask. “Kind of like she is now. Very clear about what her work is. And probably one of the most glamorous people I’ve ever met. Not from trying, just effortlessly.” (Lorna would disagree; before the opening party for Earth & Sky, she told me, several friends had called to beg her not to wear exercise pants or trainers.)

Lorna has ordered matcha lattes – one classic green, one mauve (CBD, lavender, and ube, a purple yam) – and we drank them in a little office in Hauser & Wirth. On the walls were some of her exquisite Sky Pin Ups, an ongoing series in which mid-century models are clothed in constellations older than cavemen. These will be part of the Met show. They combine Ebony and Jet centrefolds and calendar images with pictures snipped from old books – including Minerals from Earth and Sky – and sometimes ink or paint.

In 2021, the singer Rihanna asked Lorna to make a set of collage portraits of her for Essence magazine. Lorna was initially wary, she told me (“Magazines can be very complicated – a lot of cooks in the kitchen”), but when her daughter, Zora, found out – “Man Down” had been a favourite track on the school run – “she said, ‘I’ll kill you if you don’t do this.’ And you know what? It was really fun. I was not interested in doing a bunch of beauty shots, but Rihanna was on board with that, and I had protection just by the talent, the star quality, of her.” (Zora, an actor, is one of the few people with whom Lorna shares her work in its early stages.)

Lorna lives within walking distance of her studio, in a Federal-style brick house with a 1970s extension. “When there are deadlines to attend to, like with the Met show, or when I have an idea for something, then in the move towards executing that or trying to figure that out, I like to get up early, to be here in the studio early,” she said. “But I’m not someone who has to come in and keep a schedule. I don’t like working really late, just in terms of light. I think maybe I used to like that, but having a child, it ruins staying up really late.” She laughed. “And I never switched back.” Lorna also has a house in Los Angeles.

At the gallery, we talked about how – and if – the landscape for women artists has changed since Lorna started out. “There’s an Annie Leibovitz exhibition upstairs,” she said, “and I see her as a maverick in terms of having control, from knowing her work for many years and understanding the strategy that she took to not have a dozen art directors telling her what to do or what the image was going to be. She had to create a whole system. I found that to be really impressive.

“There should not be an assumption about the scope or the importance of my career because I’m a woman, or a Black woman in particular. What all of this meant was that I had to have my own belief system about my work, and about how things could work.”

For a long time, Lorna and Casebere worked on separate floors of a four-storey studio in Brooklyn designed by the architect David Adjaye. The couple met in the 1990s; Zora was born in 1999. How did it work, with both of them artists, needing creative time? Lorna shifted in her chair. “I did choose my battles. I wouldn’t say that I made sacrifices; I would say that I managed things so that everything could get done. But it was not easy. “There are expectations around women and caregiving. It is a thing of time, and not completely compressing everything into a schedule, because the mind and creativity don’t always adhere to that. To be frank, there is a gender divide.”

Does she think it made her more determined? “Not in a way of ‘I have to get to that point.’ But if I was told no, I was like, OK, whatever – next. What I was never prepared for – and I can point to several different instances of this, of being a woman, a young woman – were older artists fucking with me. It taught me that you have to demonstrate for other, younger artists a level of curiosity and generosity at all times. It is about protecting the thing that is the most vulnerable, which is that someone is trying to express their creativity.”

I asked Thelma Golden, from the Studio Museum, about this. “Lorna is incredibly present in the way she exhibits a culture of care to the people around her,” she said. “But she is also incredibly adventurous, and that’s a gift to those who get to go on those adventures with her. When she says there is something new happening, I am always eager to see what it is going to be.”