Lorna Simpson
October 5, 2006 – February 4, 2007
Upper Level Gallery

Lorna Simpson has earned a place alongside the leading artists of her generation through works that are forceful yet enigmatic, challenging yet seductive. This exhibition is the first mid-career survey dedicated to her work, providing a comprehensive examination of her photographs, installations, serigraph prints on felt and video projections. Simpson’s highly celebrated work has been instrumental in bringing questions of racial and gender identity into the mainstream of artistic practice. Her signature works from the 1980s and early 1990s focused on the black female figure, combining elegant photographic compositions with poetic, fragmentary texts. This innovative formal treatment merged groundbreaking subject matter with a broader questioning of the medium of photography as a mode of objective representation. In recent years, Simpson has created lush video installations that expand on her previous explorations of social and interpersonal issues while opening new directions in non-narrative, experimental film.

Lorna Simpson, Cloud, 2005, Serigraph on 9 felt panels, 84 x 84 inches overall, Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York .

The exhibition is organized by the American Federation of Arts.

This exhibition is 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 Auchincloss Foundation, Inc., the Martin Bucksbaum Family Foundation, Emily Fisher Landau, and The Barbara Lee Family Foundation Fund at the Boston Foundation.

In Miami, the exhibition is coordinated by Assistant Director for Programs/Curator Peter Boswell. The exhibition is supported by MAM’s Annual Exhibition Fund.