Lorna Simpson

As an avid generator and collector of images, Lorna Simpson (b. 1960) uses her work to explore African American culture while rejecting narrow, stereotypical readings of race, gender, sexuality, and American history. The work in this installation—Specific Notation, 2019—belongs to the artist’s recent foray into painting and comes from a body of work that constructs ominous arctic landscapes through composite images of ice and smoke appropriated from the archive at the Library of Congress, various newspaper clippings, and scientific magazines. Embedded in these landscapes are the figures of black women appropriated from magazines, washed in layers of dark blue ink, pushing the subjects of the painting into the realm of psychologically-charged abstraction. This marks the first installation of a work by the artist at Glenstone.