While these images differ from those earlier paintings in size and technique, they share a fascination with the way Black female subjectivity is defined and delimited by Western taxonomies, even in the most “objective” disciplines of geology and the earth sciences. The fifteen pieces in the current online exhibition-some single collages, others comprising multiple collages, often no bigger than around twenty inches along one side-were all made in 20 (three were created since the onset of the COVID shutdown). Darkening, her acclaimed 2019 show at Hauser & Wirth, consisted primarily of large-scale paintings of arctic seas that layered found text and pictures, and a totem composed of hundreds of old issues of Ebony, an essential instrument for the positive self-representation of a newly emerging Black American middle class since the 1940s she sources many of the photos in her collage-based work from the magazine. (Paris’s Musée de l’Homme was an infamous culprit, exhibiting the body of Saartjie Baartman, the so-called “Hottentot Venus,” until the 1970s, and only returning her remains to South Africa for burial in 2002.) Lorna Simpson’s new exhibition, Give Me Some Moments, available online via the Hauser & Wirth website, nods to those histories of museological display that consigned Africanness to the realm of natural history, and how they have implicated contemporary Black women in their racist assumptions across time and space.Īfter years of work in conceptual photography and video, often characterized by subtle and haunting reflections on gender, race, and the interior lives of Black women, Simpson has turned to collage to explore similar themes, taking up readymade text and images. It was not so long ago-appallingly recently, in fact-that European museums displayed the remains of African men and women in their galleries of human evolution, treating their history not as cultural but as natural, of the earth and the animals, even as they filled their walls with artistic treasures looted from the African continent by colonial armies. Lorna Simpson: Give Me Some Moments, Hauser & Wirth, online exhibition on view here, through December 31, 2020

Lorna Simpson, Construction, 2020. Collage on paper, 22 3/16 × 17 1/16 inches. © Lorna Simpson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: James Wang.

Lorna simpson collages