Lorna Simpson

Lorna SimpsonBorn New York City 1960
Lives New York City
Still, 1997
Serigraph on 36 felt panels
121 ½ x 217 9/16 inches,
30 7/16 x 24 3/16 inches, each panel
Edition 1/2
Collection Miami Art Museum, museum purchase with funds from Mark and
Nedra Oren and Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz


Lorna Simpson first became well known in the mid-1980s, examining racial and gender identity with large-scale photograph and text works that are as formally elegant as they are subtly provocative. Her signature works of that period focused on the black female figure, shown either faceless or with her back turned, accompanied by fragmentary texts.

In 1997, MAM presented a new series by Simpson featuring large-scale photographs printed on felt panels, as part of its New Work program. The series was made up of images of urban locales - an arcade, a clock tower, a city park, a hotel room - devoid of any human presence.  Narrative texts accompanied each work, describing human encounters occurring within the pictured setting.

Simpson's Still, which had been the centerpiece of the show, became the first work ever acquired by MAM through purchase. A 36-panel felt work, Still presents an image of an urban park onto which texts describing the actions, sometimes illicit, of unseen park visitors are inscribed. This provocative work, in which the artist explores human relationships while paradoxically banishing the physical body, co-opts the viewer into the position of an unwitting voyeur.

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. Her work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1990), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1992), the Miami Art Museum (1997), the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1999), and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2003). She has participated in such important international exhibitions as the Hugo Boss Prize (1998) at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and documenta XI (2002) in Kassel, Germany. Simpson has been the subject of numerous articles, catalogue essays, and a monograph published by Phaidon Press.