Lorna Simpson

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 she emerged from the graduate program at San Diego in 1985, she was already considered a pioneer of conceptual photography. Her initial body of work alone helped to incite a significant shift in the view of the photographic art’s transience and malleability. Simpson first became well known in the mid 1980’s 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. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Miami Art Museum, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and in numerous international exhibitions.