Photography, video, installation, and now painting in her new solo

show, “Darkening,” in Chelsea. Is there anything this artist can’t do?

By Siddhartha Mitter

June 13, 2019

The mood is blue in the new paintings of Lorna Simpson. Blue like glaciers in polar night.
Blue like a frigid ocean. Blue like premonition, blue like the blues.

“Dark times, to me, mean dark paintings,” the artist said recently, in her spacious new
studio at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Big, brooding landscapes, up to nine feet tall, lined the wall. Dark blue tones — cobalt,
navy, midnight — nearly saturated them, with areas of respite in turquoise and a bleary,
overcast gray. Other paintings, slightly smaller, of superimposed faces of black women
against abstract backgrounds were intimate, but just as engulfing.

At 58, Ms. Simpson is taking measure of the moment — political, personal — in her
distinctive way: indirectly, with open-ended meanings and an element of mystery.

Lorna Simpson’s “Source Notes,” 2019, ink and screenprint on gessoed fiberglass.
Lorna Simpson and Hauser & Wirth

“She’s taken everything she’s made and moved into new territory,” said Thelma Golden,
the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem and a close observer of her
work.

Ms. Simpson begins with vintage photographs: century-old black-and-whites of polar

expeditions for the landscapes; pictures in ads and articles in Ebony magazine, one of her
go-to sources, from the 1950s through 1970s for the portraits.

These are digitally enlarged, screenprinted, and transferred onto her painting surfaces,
mostly fiberglass board. She also introduces vertical strips of text, sliced from Ebony
pages then magnified, that flash across the composition, too narrow to decipher.
Only then does she paint, using ink — an ingredient, she pointed out, imported from her
recent work in drawing and collage, now deployed at massive scale.

“I love trying to figure out how to have that same quality,” she said. “The liquidity of the
ink, but also its iridescence, the way that it pools, the way that I can make areas opaque.”

From left: “Special Character #2,” “Special Character #6,” “Special Character #5” and
untitled pieces at Ms. Simpson’s studio. Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times

From left: “Special Character #2,” “Special Character #6,” “Special Character #5” and
 untitled pieces at Ms. Simpson’s studio. Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times

The poem refers to Henson, the African-American explorer who made multiple
expeditions alongside Robert Peary near the turn of the 20th century, learning from the
Inuit how to dwell in the terrain, but was neglected in most histories until long after his
death in 1955.

The excerpt that Ms. Simpson chose from the poem evokes the landscape: Endless
blueness. White is blue. And then: It makes me wonder — yet again — was there ever such
a thing as whiteness? I am beginning to grow suspicious. An open window.

“Darkened,” 2018, ink and screenprint on gessoed wood. Lorna Simpson and Hauser & Wirth

Women artists such as Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman had led major advances in
photo-based work, but the Pictures Generation scene, as Ms. Simpson remembers it,
evinced little interest in black artists.

“I think sometimes there’s a lack of honesty about how segregated it was,” she said.
The Brooklyn milieu was young and interdisciplinary. Ms. Simpson was part of the
theater collective Rodeo Caldonia, a feisty crew of women visual artists, performers and
playwrights. The broader crowd included the Black Rock Coalition and the just-emerging
Spike Lee.

“We were of a mind that you were never going to get permission to create the world you
wanted to live in,” she said. “But people of like mind were just going to go for it.”

Her work, in that spirit, proceeded from a feminist point of view that was natural and
taken as a given, with no need for polemics. Today, it is part of the evolving contemporary
canon. Several of her early pieces capped, for instance, the landmark 2017 exhibition “We
Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85” at the Brooklyn Museum.

“Lorna’s role is as a great innovator of the generation,” said Kellie Jones, the art historian
and Columbia University professor who is her friend and contemporary. “People in many
ways continue to see her as a photographer, but that’s going to become harder, because
the innovation with materials is going to take over these designations.”

Inside Lorna Simpson’s Art

Explore some of her work with photographs and other media.

Evoking What Can’t Be Seen Feb. 15, 2018

Nostalgia in the Era of Climate Change April 10, 2019

A version of this article appears in print on June 14, 2019, on Page C13 of the New York edition with the headline: She’s Feeling Kind of Blue