Latest news with #LornaSimpson
New York Times
08-07-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Lorna Simpson's Brooklyn Art Studio Is On the Market
When Lorna Simpson couldn't find the right spot for her Brooklyn art studio, she did what many artists in New York City often can only dream of doing: She had one built from the ground up. Ms. Simpson, renowned for her photographs and multimedia work, and her then-husband, the artist James Casebere, commissioned the British architect David Adjaye to design a building at 208 Vanderbilt Avenue in the Fort Greene neighborhood where a one-story garage previously stood. (It was one of Mr. Adjaye's first projects in the United States.) 'I could not find something that I liked that felt spacious and that did not feel like a tight traditional townhouse domestic space with limited free-wall space,' Ms. Simpson said in an email. The four-story, 22-foot-wide structure, which Mr. Adjaye called 'Pitch Black,' is clad in polypropylene panels on the front and side facades, while the back portion is mostly glass. Ms. Simpson created many of her works there, but today the building, which was completed in 2006, is mainly used for archiving and storage, as well as entertaining and hosting guests. Several years ago, Ms. Simpson moved her primary studio to a larger, leased commercial space nearby. Now she's putting the Vanderbilt Avenue building on the market with an asking price of $6.5 million, according to the broker, Leslie Marshall of the Corcoran Group, who is listing it with her colleague Nick Hovsepian. Annual property taxes are $12,161. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Lorna Simpson: Painting as a Weapon of Freedom
Some of our most interesting artists have one thing in common. They do outstanding work early on, then, rather than coasting by recycling that success, they complicate it, even change artist Lorna Simpson is one these restless souls, and she has the technical and imaginative chops to make major changes work, as is evident in a corner-turning retrospective of paintings, 'Source Notes,' now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Simpson gained a strong reputation as a standout among a new generation of conceptual photographers and artists who — following 'Pictures Generation' progenitors like Cindy Sherman a decade earlier — used photographic techniques somewhat the way painters used paint. Through a traditionally point-and-shoot, ostensibly reality-capturing medium, they created entirely fictional images. Simpson began as a straight-up picture-taker. A native New Yorker — born in Brooklyn in 1960, and raised in Queens — she studied photography at the School of Visual Arts and initially identified her work with the genre of 'street photography.' Graduate school at the University of California, San Diego, where Conceptualism was the reigning mode, added a new dimension to that early impulse. So was the perception that her career opportunities in the field were limited: 'Being a Black woman photographer was like being nobody,' as she has put it. So she saw no reason not to experiment both with her medium and with the subjects that interested her, namely the politics of gender and race. To that end she developed a studio-based style that combined staged images, notably shots of unnamed Black women posing in plain white shifts against a neutral backdrop, their faces turned away from the camera or out of its range, with results that evoke voyeuristic 19th-century ethnological documents, mug shots, and performance art stills. Most of these images have incorporated short texts that hint at explanatory narratives, some violent, without actually providing anything explicit. Creating on aura of mystery has been her generative M.O., one she has applied to film and installation work as well as to still photography. What has changed in the past decade is her primary medium. Around 2014, she began, for the first time since her pre-art-school years, to focus on painting, and the Met exhibition is a tight but monumental survey of this new work. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Punk, Monet and Puerto Rico: New Photography From Elle Pérez
Subtle resistance to representation is on display in a handful of new shows, where some artists are refusing the notion that figuration must be their primary subject, or what is required to be successful. 'Source Notes,' Lorna Simpson's riveting new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, highlights her shift toward painting while still emphasizing the artists' career-long interest in destabilizing expectations of Black life and the art that makes sense of it. The painter Jordan Casteel's newfound focus on florals is a dreamy drift away from her signature portraits. And one of the most fascinating new artists I found to be coyly refusing to play the game of identity politics is the New York photographer Elle Pérez, whose exhibition at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Upper Manhattan centers the politics of personhood over the consumption of that same self. The lens lingers on physical terrain: yards, curving coastlines. The portraits included are mantle-size, which, in the cavernous space, dares you to come close and forge an intimate relationship with the work. At first glance, one could erroneously wonder if the show, comprising nearly 30 images, a slide show, a short film and a collage, is a premature retrospective. The works on display span the artist's career from 2009 to 2025 and seem to be organized semi-chronologically. But it quickly becomes clear that 'The World Is Always Again Beginning, History With the Present,' organized by Jenny Jaskey, chief curator, in collaboration with Pérez, functions as a cut section invitation into the sacred practice of process. This is a show that starts before you get to the show. The Academy is nestled in the vibrant and rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Washington Heights, near Boricua College. The elaborate iron gates of the 1923 building that welcome visitors invoke the Gilded Age and its arts patronage, a sorely needed reminder of possibility amid devastating arts defunding. As Pérez explains inside: 'This is the neighborhood that made me.' Pérez was born in 1989 in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents who were also born and raised there. (As Pérez said in a recent interview, 'My grandparents were the generation that made the jump.') Instead of traditional blocks of wall text, the artist chose to install fragments of their poetry, like those lines, which start the exhibition. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Hypebeast
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hypebeast
Lorna Simpson's Decade of Painting Gets a Met Spotlight
Summary ForLorna Simpson, images are always up for negotiation. A pioneer of conceptual photography, the New York-based artist is lauded for her ability to unravel the ways we reckon and wrestle with identity, challenging traditional narratives through text and image. Expanding on her impressive oeuvre of film, photography and collage, Simpson has spent the last decade delving into painting, building on her earlier themes while introducing new visual textures and techniques. TheMetropolitan Museum of Artis currently hosting the first museum survey dedicated to Simpson's painterly chapter. TitledSource Notes, the exhibition brings together more than 30 pieces, shedding light on the artist's technical brilliance and eye for repurposing history with poetic precision. Works on view include 'True Value (2015) and 'Three Figures (2014), key pieces from Simpson's monumental presentation at the 2015 Venice Biennale, alongside 'did time elapse' (2024) from her newest body of paintings,Earth and Sky. The title reflects Simpson's use of archival materials — from vintage editions ofEbonyandJetto star maps and minerals — across her practice. Cut, collaged and puzzled back together, these fragments, often arranged non-chronologically, mirror the artist's own rich, layered process. Through paint, they gain new resonance, building bridges between the past and what is deeply present. Lorna Simpson: Source Notes is now onviewin New York through November 2. The Metropolitan Museum of Art1000 5th Ave,New York, NY 10028
Washington Post
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Johns Hopkins exhibit elevates the artists of its city
'Deconstruction Worker' points to the past, present and future of painting. This 2019 series by artist Derrick Adams includes portraits with skewed geometric features. His angular collages look back to the experiments in design that led to Dada and cubism more than a century ago. Composing subjects in profile, as Adams does, goes back even further. But the vibe is present tense: The sartorial flair of his figures, who are depicted in rich fabrics, nods to a whole host of contemporary Black artists, among them Mickalene Thomas and Lorna Simpson. Adams has made his place among them as one of the artists setting the agenda today.
