Lorna Simpson:
Works on Paper

One of the leading artists of her generation, Lorna Simpson came to prominence in the mid-1980s through her photographic and textual works that confronted and challenged conventional attitudes toward race, gender, and cultural memory with a potent mixture of formal elegance and conceptual rigor. Since the late 1990s, Simpson has extended these concerns into a series of film and video installations and large-scale photographic works printed on felt.

Works on Paper highlights a recent body of work that explores the complex relationship between the photographic archive and processes of self-fashioning. As in Simpson’s earlier works, these new drawings and collages take the African American woman as a point of departure, continuing her longstanding examination of the ways that gender and culture shape the experience of life in our contemporary multiracial society. This is the first museum exhibition dedicated to Simpson’s drawings and collages—including a new series of works created during her tenure as the Aspen Art Museum’s 2013 Jane and Marc Nathanson Distinguished Artist in Residence. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, scholarly catalogue.