Another World

A decade ago the artist Lorna Simpson took up painting for the first time. A monumental new show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals all she's accomplished.

- Dodie Kazanjian

Not many artists have found their way forward during an earthquake. Lorna Simpson, whose pioneering conceptual photographs and multimedia work over more than three decades had already established her as a major voice for Black feminist art, was in a residency program in Sonoma, California, on August 24, 2014, when the area was hit by a 6.0 tremor that killed two people and injured 300 others. "It made me a bit fearless," she tells me. Lorna had been doing drawings and collages for the last few years. Recently she had started to feel the urge to move into something bigger and more ambitious—specifically, painting—but she hadn't painted since her first years in college, and she didn't know how to go about it. "You're just worried about making some paintings, and the earth is moving beneath you like a freight train?" she thought to herself, "Just make some paintings! Don't be so precious about it. There's this thing with me of taking risks and working blind and not being entirely certain of what I'm doing. It's like, just try it and see what happens." A year later, the much-admired curator Okwui Enwezor showed Lorna's first paintings at the Venice Biennale. And this May, the full range of her paintings over the past decade will be featured in an exhibition of their own at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"For me, Lorna Simpson is a hero," says David Breslin, the Met's curator in charge of the department of modern and contemporary art. "She is a conceptual artist who made us rethink what conceptual art was—what art was—at a particular moment. I see Lorna as one of those artists, with Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and Louise Lawler, and also David Hammons, who uses every tool at their disposal to get their point across. I love the confidence of artists who is willing to suggest that, 'I need to reinvent what you think of me, but I'm not reinventing myself. I've always been this way.'