“Over the course of time, things shift and change, and the parameters of the archive show. “ being able to look back at it and see what an amazing archive it is,” Simpson says. They were objects that lived in so many Black spaces-barbershops, grandmothers’ coffee tables-both intimate and public. Jet and Ebony were the visual definition of postwar Black striving.

Why is Simpson drawn to working with these images from Jet and Ebony? She is quick to point out that her use of material from these publications is a conversation with artists like Theaster Gates and Kerry James Marshall, who have each engaged in their own work with the legacy of the magazines and the Black-owned, Chicago-based company that started them, Johnson Publishing. … What are the things that you’re most attracted to, without trying to overintellectualize or force them into a particular paradigm of meaning?” “I have a huge archive of materials to work from,” she explains. They were born, she says, in part from necessity. The collages are a continuation of a series Simpson began early in the pandemic that is part of her new show, “Everrrything,” on view through January 9 at the Los Angeles outpost of her gallery, Hauser & Wirth. And shouldn’t have any societal boundaries in any way.

“I noticed,” she says, “I just need to be real present in whatever I’m making.” What Simpson has made for Harper’s Bazaar is Floating Actuality, a group of collages that play with her personal archive of pinup photographs from old issues of Jet and Ebony magazines and brim with the possibilities of the cosmos, referencing both the art history of the female body and the vastness of the universe. The 61-year-old artist, an influential creative force since first emerging on the scene in the 1980s, was forced to rethink how she approached making art. Usually in New York, she was unmoored from her main studio base. Talking to Simpson felt, in my imagination, like talking to an oracle.īut there was Simpson on Zoom from Los Angeles, detailing her time during the pandemic, which sounded so much like the experiences of so many people I know: It was about, she says, “attending to family and people around me.” When Covid-19 hit, Simpson was in L.A., where she was preparing for a show. Her work-ranging from photographic studies of herself and other subjects, overlaid with text, to films, drawings, and sculptures-has shaped so much of the conversation around Black womanhood, sexuality, and the body for the past three decades. I was nervous to speak with Lorna Simpson. © LORNA SIMPSON, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH, PHOTOS BY JAMES WANG Lorna Simpson, Floating Actuality, 2021 (Details), collage on handmade paper, 8 parts, each unframed, 19 3/4 X 17 3/8 In (50.2 X 44.1 Cm), overall dimensions variable, edition unique.

Lorna Simpson Collages by Lorna Simpson