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    Lorna Simpson Collages
    Lorna Simpson Collages
    Lorna Simpson Collages
    Ebook269 pages20 minutes

    Lorna Simpson Collages

    By Lorna Simpson and Elizabeth Alexander

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    About this ebook

    "Black women's heads of hair are galaxies unto themselves, solar systems, moonscapes, volcanic interiors."
    —Elizabeth Alexander, from the Introduction

    Using advertising photographs of black women (and men) drawn from vintage issues of Ebony and Jet magazines, the exquisite and thought-provoking collages of world-renowned artist Lorna Simpson explore the richly nuanced language of hair. Surreal coiffures made from colorful ink washes, striking geological formations from old textbooks, and other unexpected forms and objects adorn the models to mesmerizingly beautiful effect.

    Featuring 160 artworks, an artist's statement, and an introduction by poet, author, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander, this volume celebrates the irresistible power of Simpson's visual vernacular.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChronicle Books Digital
    Release dateJun 5, 2018
    ISBN9781452161754
    Lorna Simpson Collages
    Author

    Lorna Simpson

    Lorna Simpson is a renowned American artist whose work challenges conventional views of gender, memory, and representation. Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries around the world. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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      Book preview

      Lorna Simpson Collages - Lorna Simpson

      We start with the Book of Miss Brooks, and her poem, The Anniad, which casts the life of an ordinary black girl, Annie Allen, in epic scale and form:

      THINK OF THAUMATURGIC LASS LOOKING IN HER LOOKING-GLASS AT THE UNEMBROIDERED BROWN; PRINTING BASTARD ROSES THERE; THEN EMOTIONALLY AWARE OF THE BLACK AND BOISTEROUS HAIR, TAMING ALL THAT ANGER DOWN.

      In Lorna Simpson’s collages, the black and boisterous hair is the universal governing principle. Black women’s heads of hair are galaxies unto themselves, solar systems, moonscapes, volcanic interiors. The hair she paints has a mind of its own. It is sinuous and cloudy and fully alive. It is forest and ocean, its own emotional weather. Black women’s hair is epistemology, but we cannot always discern its codes.

      Watercolor is the perfect medium for Simpson here because of how it holds light and appears to be translucent. But it is also a wash, a shadow cast over what we cannot know in these women. Simpson’s portraits invite us to look, by their sidelong glances or direct gazes. We are compelled, always, by the phantasmagorical hair, which both invites and obscures.

      In these pictures black women’s phantasmagorical hair is like smoke, but nothing is turning to ash. It is a non-consuming smoke, the mesmerizing beauty of smoke as it curls and wafts and draws a viewer inexorably near.

      If black people are the window and the breaking of the window, as William Pope.L asserts (we are reminded by curator Amanda Hunt), what are black women, in Simpson’s vision here?

      Black women are blue and black and ocher and goldenrod and magenta. Black women are unfathomable.

      Black women are composed, necessarily immaculate. A black woman could go off at any moment.

      Black women are mighty and terrifying.

      I do not know a black women who is at leisure. I have never known a black woman not efficient. Black women bide their time.

      Black women are the shimmering surface and the power beneath.

      What does it mean for a sister to sing that song?

      The repetitions in these images suggest that we are thought of by some as a dime a dozen: undervalued, yes, but also, abundant. Black women are everywhere glorious and unsung.

      The black woman is elemental, of the earth, magma, and gem, malachite and azurite.

      She is Afro-blue.

      Before the serpentine coil, the gravity-defying nimbus of black hair, there is grease and there are plaits and there are headrags and there are silk sleeping scarves and satin pillowcases. Simpson doesn’t show us that. Yet we know it is there.

      One soundtrack to these pictures: A woman sings Otis Redding’s "Try a Little

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