{"data":{"id":"3452","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":3452,"topgoose_id":647,"tms_id":3452,"display_name":"Lorna Simpson","sort_name":"Simpson Lorna","display_date":"1960–","begin_date":"1960","end_date":"0","biography":"\u003cp\u003eAfter receiving a BFA from the School of\nVisual Arts, New York, and an MFA from the\nUniversity of California, San Diego, Lorna\nSimpson began in the mid-1980s to produce\nworks combining photographs and text\nthat draw on aspects of Conceptual art to\nconsider themes of race, gender, and identity.\nAlthough they engage broader contexts of\nhistorical memory and visual culture,\nSimpson’s photo-text tableaux resist easy\nexplication, relying instead on viewers’\ninterpretations to untangle their enigmatic\nsyntheses of image and language.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/collection/works/7778\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e2 Tracks\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e, for example, seems to set forth a narrative in its juxtaposition of a photograph of the shoulders and close-cropped head of an African American woman, seen from the back; a pair of flanking photographs of long braids of black hair; and the words \u003cem\u003eback\u003c/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003etrack\u003c/em\u003e, on accompanying plaques. But the relationship between these components remains unclear. The words have literal correlates (the subject’s back and the tracklike braids), but the phrase \u003cem\u003ebacktrack\u003c/em\u003e, with its connotations of reversal and regression, provokes consideration of additional meanings as African American hair, a favored motif of the artist’s, takes on loaded significance. Simpson frequently pictures her subjects from behind or crops or fragments her images—challenging the presumed objectivity of the photographic medium— and she often invokes systems of counting, indexing, or classification only to violate the order of these typologies. Both formal strategies heighten the ambiguity of her combinations of photographs and text.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the 1990s Simpson began creating\nlarge-scale, multipanel photographic\nworks on felt. Her practice in recent years\nfurthers her examination of contemporary\nidentity in the mediums of drawing,\nfilm, and video.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500088695","wikidata_id":"Q6681389","created_at":"2017-08-30T15:46:11.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-04-10T07:00:59.747-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/3452/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/3452/exhibitions"}}}}