Lorna Simpson

The first black woman to take part in the Venice Biennale, Lorna Simpson is a conceptual artist who uses her camera and words to construct new worlds and deconstruct the worlds we know. This monograph opens with her earliest documentary photographs from the late 1970s and early 1980s, many never before seen, and includes her most recent works – large-scale serigraphs on felt and a work-in-progress video installation, made in collaboration with architect David Adjaye. This book features Simpson’s photo-text pieces of the mid-1980s that first brought her critical attention. Also included are stills from moving picture installations, such as Interior/Exterior and Call Waiting, The Institute, and Momentum as well as drawings related to her film and video work. Throughout the volume Simpson’s questioning of representation is evident, whether it is in her moving juxtaposition of text and image, her pairing of staged self-images with their sources in found photographs, or her haunting and nostalgic video, Cloudscape and its echo in the felt work Cloud.