Lorna Simpson - Silverstein Photography Lecture Series

Thursday, Oct. 2, 2014, 06:30pm
Meyerson Hall, Room B1

Visiting artist Lorna Simpson discusses her work as part of the Howard A. Silverstein & Patricia Bleznak Silverstein Photography Lecture Series. 

Biography:

Lorna Simpson was born in 1960 in Brooklyn, New York, and received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. When Lorna Simpson emerged from the graduate program at San Diego in 1985, she was already considered a pioneer of conceptual photography. Feeling a strong need to reexamine and re-define photographic practice for contemporary relevance, Simpson was producing work that engaged the conceptual vocabulary of the time by creating exquisitely crafted documents that are as clean and spare as the closed, cyclic systems of meaning they produce. Her initial body of work alone helped to incite a significant shift in the view of the photographic art’s transience and malleability.

Lorna Simpson first became well-known in the mid-1980s for her large- scale photograph-and text works that confront and challenge narrow, conventional views of gender, identity, culture, history and memory. With unidentified figures as a visual point of departure, Simpson uses the figure to examine the ways in which gender and culture shape the interactions, relationships and experiences of our lives in contemporary America. In the mid-1990s, she began creating large multi-panel photographs printed on felt that depict the sites of public – yet unseen – sexual encounters. Another aspect of her practice includes figurative drawings of characters, and collages as well as a new video work titled “Chess,” 2013 which premiered at the Jeu De Paume in May 2103.