Spotlight | Brooklyn’s Own Lorna Simpson

Welcome to Broadway Stages’ Spotlight, where we feature local shops, restaurants, organizations, individuals, and venues. In celebration of  Black History Month, we are shining the spotlight on the achievements of Black Americans who have paved the way and continue to blaze a trail forward. Today, we feature prominent artist and Brooklyn native Lorna Simpson.

Lorna Simpson is well known for her powerful artworks that combine photographs with words. Using her experiences as a Black woman, Simpson uses photography, video, and collage to challenge narrow and conventional ideas about women, culture, and race.

Simpson was born on August 13, 1960, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. From an early age, Simpson was steeped in the art world. Her parents – a Jamaican-Cuban father and Black-American mother – moved from the Midwest to New York and took her to plays, museums, concerts, and dance performances as a child.

She spent her school days at the High School of Art and Design, and in the summers, Simpson took courses at the Art Institute of Chicago while visiting her grandmother. She journeyed throughout Europe, Africa, and the United States, taking documentary photographs in the late 1970s. And in 1982, she graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York with a B.F.A. in photography.

During her graduate work at the University of California, San Diego, she began to question documentary photography’s objectivity and implied truth. As a result, her approach to photography became more conceptual. She began to juxtapose a deadpan photographic perspective with simple, declarative text.

Simpson’s work has been exhibited widely. In 1990 she became the first Black American woman to have her work shown at the Venice Biennale. That same year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a solo exhibition of her work.

The list of exhibitions goes on to include the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Miami Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among other institutions.

Throughout her career,  Simpson’s work has been roundly recognized. Some awards she has received include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work from the College Art Association, and a Whitney Museum of American Art Award. Most recently, she won the J. Paul Getty Medal in 2019. Simpson's portrait of Rihanna for the January 2021 cover of Essence has been deemed as one of the most iconic fashion images ever made by a panel of experts in The New York Magazine. Take a look at the cover and other photographs in this January 2021 Essence article. 

Lorna Simpson has undoubtedly earned her global acclaim and art-world stardom. She is an inspiration to us all.   We encourage you to learn more about Simpson; follow her on Instagram and explore her work on Artsy and Tate.org.