Lorna Simpson a Resource for Educators

Lorna Simpson A Resource for Educators American Federation of Arts Lorna Simpson A Resource for Educators American Federation of Arts © 2006 American Federation of Arts Lorna Simpson, the exhibition this resource accompanies, is organized by the American Federation of Arts and made possible, in part, by grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Peter Norton Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lily Auchin- American Federation of Arts closs Foundation, Inc., the Martin Bucksbaum Family Foundation, Emily 41 East 65th Street Fisher Landau, and The Barbara Lee Family Foundation Fund at the Boston New York, NY 10021-6594 Foundation. 212.988.7700 afaweb.org The AFA is a nonprofit institution that organizes art exhibitions for presen- tation in museums around the world, publishes exhibition catalogues, and Exhibition Itinerary to Date develops education programs. Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles April 16–July 10, 2006 Miami Art Museum October 13, 2006–January 21, 2007 Whitney Museum of American Art New York February 8–May 6, 2007 Kalamazoo Institute of Arts Kalamazoo, Michigan May 25–August 19, 2007 Gibbes Museum of Art Charleston, South Carolina September 7–December 2, 2007 Please direct questions about these materials to: Suzanne Elder Burke Director of Education American Federation of Arts 212.988.7700 ext. 26 [email protected] Design/Production: Susan E. Kelly Front Cover: Lorna Simpson, Call Waiting, 1997 (pp. 30–32) Back Cover: Lorna Simpson, Waterbearer, 1986 (pp. 18–19) CONTENTS About This Resource 4 Exhibition Overview 5 Artist Biography 6 Curriculum Connections 8 Discussion Questions and Activities 11 Selected Works of Art with Discussion Questions and Activities 15 Glossary 36 Bibliography 38 Web Resources 41 4 ABOUT THIS RE SOURCE Art can be a great source of inspiration for students. Contemporary art, in particular, shows students that artists often establish their own rules for artmaking, creating works that encourage people to see and under- stand the world around them in different ways. The aim of this resource is to facilitate the process of looking at and understanding Lorna Simpson’s work and to help teachers interpret the works in the exhibition. Teach- ers may utilize these materials either in conjunction with a class visit to the museum or independently. Suggested discussion questions focus on a selection of works from the exhibition and offer ways of making them more accessible to students. They are the first step toward engaging students, getting them to look at and analyze art. Students should be encouraged to make connections among various works of art; to establish links with topics and concepts they are studying in school; and to express their ideas about the works of art in this resource and about art in general. The discussion questions and classroom activities in this resource can be adapted for use with junior high school, high school, or university level students. Students should familiarize themselves with the words included in the glossary (p. 36). These words are bolded when they appear for the first time in the resource text. This resource was prepared by Suzanne Elder Burke, Director of Education, AFA. The information on individual works of art is based on the essay by Okwui Enwezor in the exhibition catalogue Lorna Simpson (New York: AFA in association with Abrams, 2006). The exhibition overview is based on a text written by AFA Curator Yvette Y. Lee. The information on selected works of art, curriculum connections, activities, discussion questions, glossary, and bibliography were prepared by Ms. Elder Burke with the assistance of AFA Education Interns Sarah Birnbaum and Paolo Magagnoli. Corridor (Phone), 2003 Digital chromatic print mounted to Plexiglas Michaelyn Mitchell, AFA Director of Publications and Design, edited the 27 X 72 inches text and supervised design of the resource, with the assistance of Alec Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York Spangler. E XHIBITION OVERVIEW 5 One of the leading artists of her generation, Lorna Simpson first became well known in the mid-1980s, confronting and challenging conventional views toward gender, identity, culture, history, and memory with large-scale photograph and text works that are formally elegant and subtly provoca- tive. Her 1986 photograph-and-text piece Waterbearer employs a structure that would become a signature of much of her work—the pairing of a partially obscured figure with suggestive fragments of text, a juxtaposition that challenges the viewer’s expectations of narrative and identity. By the mid-90s, Simpson began to concentrate on creating large multi-panel photographs printed on felt. These softly sensual images depict urban locales as the site of public, yet unseen, couplings. More recently, the artist has turned to creating moving images. Since 1997, Simpson’s work has shown a renewed emphasis on the figure, with her film and video installations often focusing on the figure as a moving image. For more than two decades, Lorna Simpson has raised thought-provoking questions about stereotypes and identity. Her attention to craft and picto- rial richness seduces the viewer while the innovative juxtaposition of figure and gesture with text and narrative extends the experience of her work beyond visual fulfillment into genuine self-reflection. Simpson has participated in many solo and group exhibitions, but this mid- career survey curated by Helaine Posner, AFA Adjunct Curator, is the first opportunity for audiences to see the artist’s full range over a period of more than twenty years of production. Beginning with examples of her earli- est photograph-and-text works dating from 1985, the exhibition follows Simpson’s career to the present, featuring mural-scaled felt works from the mid-1990s, film and video installations from 1997 to 2004, and the artist’s most recent photographs. The exhibition is traveling to five ven- ues, opening on April 16, 2006, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and subsequently traveling to the Miami Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, and the Gibbes Museum of Art. 6 ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Born in 1960, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, Lorna Simpson spent her teenage years in the neighboring borough of Queens. The only child of middle-class parents—her father was a social worker, her mother a secretary in a hospital—Simpson was encouraged to pursue her interest in the arts. She attended the High School of Art and Design and went on to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where the photography department focused mainly on documentary work. By the end of Simpson’s undergraduate training in the early eighties, she had come to believe that documentary photography was not only limited but potentially exploitative. She continued to experiment with photography in San Diego, where she moved to complete her professional training at the University of California. There she worked with Eleanor Antin, Martha Rosler, and Carrie Mae Weems, feminist and conceptualist artists whose practice of combining images with text helped Simpson formulate the structure of her work. “It was there,” she explains, “that I was first exposed to underground films, their analytical structure, and the history of film, but I didn’t really have the desire to make films. Due to the technology at the time—the late 1970s and early ’80s—it would have been a behemoth project to take that on, financially as well as technically.”⁄ Instead, Simpson transferred the way experimental films use language and narrative to the realm of still photography, coupling images with text. After earning her Master of Fine Arts in 1985, Simpson moved back to New York, where she continued creating works that combined images with ambiguous fragments of text. By 1995, she had moved away from this body of work toward a series of large photographic impressions of landscape and architecture on a grid of felt pieces accompanied by text panels with a more explicit narrative. This interest in narrative led to another evolution for Simpson, and in 1997, she began working in film. Throughout Simpson’s career and her experimentation with media, her work has eluded direct interpretation. Sylvia Wolf, photography curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, has observed that “in all of her work—films, video installations, and photographs—Lorna never tells the whole story, or she tells an open-ended story and forces us to complete it in a way that draws attention to our own belief systems.”¤ Simpson has received numerous honors, grants, and awards. She was the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition in the “Projects” series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1990) and to represent the United States at the prestigious Venice Biennale (1993). Since then she 7 has been included in a number of significant national and international art shows—from the Whitney Biennial (1991, 1993, 1995, 2002) to Documenta at Kassel, Germany (1987 and 2002). She has also had one-person exhibitions—of her felt works at the Miami Art Museum (1997) and of her film installations at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (1997) and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1999). In 1998 Simpson was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and in 2001, she won the Whitney Museum American Art Award. 1. Lorna Simpson, quoted in Barbara Pollack, “Turning Down the Stereotypes,” ARTNews (Septem- ber 2002): 137. 2. Lorna Simpson, quoted in Barbara Pollack, “Turning Down the Stereotypes,” ARTNews (Septem- ber 2002): 139. Proof Reading, 1989 4 Polaroid prints, 4 engraved plastic plaques 40 X 40 inches overall Collection Steven Johnson and Walter Sudol, New York 8 CURRICULUM CONNECTIONS Below are themes that educators may use to approach the works of art included in this resource.

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