As Davis power-washed de Lavallade off the reusable screen, Simpson settled into an armchair and reached into her formidable black canvas tote. “You wanna see?” she asked, pulling out a slim package. Inside were five wallet-size photos, probably from the nineteen-thirties or forties, of a Black man in a three-piece suit trying out various expressions. They were destined for one of her “photo booth” works: large, cloudlike arrays of found snapshots, drawings, and magazine clippings, each housed in a tiny custom frame. It’s as if the viewer were being asked to sort memory—nebulous, secondhand—into reality and invention. Simpson considered letting me watch her browse eBay: “Maybe you’ll make me lucky.”
Her art took an archival turn around the millennium, coinciding with the deaths of her parents, her marriage to Casebere, and the birth of Zora. The felt and photo-text works gave way to films and installations built from repurposed images and reënacted memories. “If you need to find something—something obscure, something that you can’t imagine—Lorna Simpson is who you call,” Golden told me. Once, Simpson offered to restore a photo album that Golden had inherited, in terrible condition, from her Jamaican grandmother. “She gave me back a museum-archive treasury,” Golden said.
Simpson, whose parents told her little about their backgrounds, has long been drawn to the memories of others. One of her most beguiling photo-booth works, “1957–2009,” began with a single snapshot: a Black woman, stylishly dressed, leaning against a mid-century car. Simpson liked it so much that she amassed nearly a hundred other photos of the same woman, sometimes along with a man. The pair appear in a series of flamboyant poses: noodling on a piano; smoking solemnly in front of art works; curtsying mid-phone call in a risqué nightdress.
Simpson came to see these photos not as candid moments but as the record of an elaborate performance—Cindy Sherman before Cindy Sherman. Defying her usual ban on appearing in her work, she decided to become the duo’s double, reënacting their “crazy narrative” shot for shot. “It took an entire summer,” she recalled, partly because she was so camera-shy. She bought wigs and costumes, and enlisted Zora—then still a child—to help set up outdoor scenes near the house she shared with Casebere in upstate New York. The resulting work includes both the original portraits and Simpson’s rendition.
It was a new and more impish kind of refusal—flaunting faces and poses while keeping the source material’s mystery intact. Around the same time, Simpson started painting small watercolor portraits, a respite from the logistical demands of film. Then, in 2010, she found a box of Ebony magazines that had belonged to her grandmother. She was riveted by the models’ stylized expressions—young women, posed within an inch of their lives, hawking jewelry, cosmetics, and hair-care products. She was drawn to the before-and-after shots, in which women were transformed into fierce “huntresses” or beaming “corn row cuties.”
Simpson began making collages, clipping out the women and giving them watercolor perms in “unnatural” shades such as lime green and violet. “It was a relief to not have to make sense,” she told me. Like the German Surrealist Hannah Höch, whose own collages she’d long admired, Simpson aimed for simplicity and strangeness. In one series, crystals replace hairdos. A pensive woman contemplates a lavender column of spodumene; another dreams up an unruly Afro of azurite malachite. It’s as if their inner lives had erupted, breaking through the glossy surface of bourgeois fantasy.
One especially arresting collage shows a pair of mascaraed eyes glaring from the shaft entrances of a graphite mine—the refusal to meet a gaze from without recast as a penetrating stare from within.
Simpson’s collages nearly always use found images, but she made an exception for Rihanna, who invited her to shoot her cover of Essence, in 2020. “There was a separate security detail for the jewelry,” James Wang, who works at the studio, recalled. Rihanna kept them waiting for seven hours. During the shoot, which went late into the night, Rihanna hovered behind Simpson and Wang, oohing and ahing as they edited in Photoshop. In the final image, the singer stares out from beneath a hairpiece made of sodium-chloride crystals—a heap of transparent cubes that echoes her diamond collar and suggests, perhaps, that she might be a bit salty.
The high-profile commission coincided with a broader resurgence of interest in Black portraiture. Many younger artists—some following Simpson’s lead—were probing the conventions of representation and remixing archival material in speculative ways. Most were painters, and Simpson, albeit somewhat unconsciously, joined them. In 2014, she began working on Claybord panels, sometimes starting with a silk-screened image, sometimes painting freehand. “She was very resistant to calling them paintings,” her studio director, Jennifer Hsu, said. Intensely private, Simpson often sneaked into her studio on weekends, when no one else was around.
Then, one day, her friend Okwui Enwezor visited. After seeing the new work, he invited her to exhibit in his edition of the Venice Biennale. He singled out “Three Figures,” based on a news photograph of civil-rights protesters being hosed by police. Simpson had broken the image across several panels and ringed it with runny black ink; he encouraged her to go even bigger, envisioning a series of monumental history paintings.
