When I ask Lorna Simpson (previously) via video interview to tell me her job description as an artist, she takes a beat and says, “Maintaining the ability to do whatever I want.” This determination is a throughline of Simpson’s career, fostered by her arts-filled upbringing in Queens, New York. “I’m raised by parents who love the arts… So I was taken everywhere, to theater, to dance, to music concerts my entire childhood,” she remembers. Add to that summers spent at the Art Institute of Chicago while visiting her maternal grandmother and the robustness of New York City school arts programs in the 70s, including four years at the High School of Art and Design, and Simpson’s career as an artist seems inevitable. As she puts it, “I didn’t know what else to be, in a way. When it came time to go to college, I was like, I’ll go to the School of Visual Arts.”

But inevitable doesn’t mean easy, particularly for a Black woman artist, and it’s fair to say that Simpson’s reputation owes as much to her tenacity as to her talent, her unwavering willingness to be guided by her own curiosity and intuition. “The idea of failure… never really occurred to me somehow. I just thought, this is part of the process of trying things. And moving forward,” she says. Though Simpson is known primarily as a photographer, she doesn’t limit herself to one particular medium, instead working in photography, painting, collage, and sculpture according to where a particular idea leads. Regardless of form, Simpson’s work asks “What do you see?” as a starting point for engaging with the viewer’s curiosity and their ideas about visual culture.

This conversation was conducted by Paulette Beete in May 2023. It has been edited for clarity.

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Paulette Beete: Though you’re best known as a photographer, you work across different media, including painting, collage, and sculpture. How do you decide which medium is best for a particular project?

Lorna Simpson: I find different mediums and to work in different mediums interesting. It’s very difficult to go, “I’m going to make a video piece” and then think, “Okay, what’s the video?” It’s more like the idea and the content and the timeframe is the framework of the way that I think about it, not so much in terms of the genre. I can stumble into things and experiment, or ideas kind of present opportunities.

I think in terms of making art or working, it’s not always comfortable. It’s not always assured. It’s not always, “I got this; this is perfect. Let me just proceed.” A lot of times, there’s maybe a lot of questions, or it can have that thing where I’m not quite sure if I’m pulling it off. I’m not quite sure if it’s a good idea or how it works. Time and again, I’ve come to respect being uncomfortable and leaning more into the process of figuring things out as a way of proceeding.

Time and again, I’ve come to respect being uncomfortable and leaning more into the process of figuring things out as a way of proceeding.

Lorna Simpson

Paulette: I’m interested in your gaze as an artist, your way of looking, and how that has evolved or changed over the years.

Lorna: Looking is a kind of brain thing in that you can look at something, and it has no meaning or is of no interest. But then it also depends what one’s perspective is at any moment. Since I collect so many magazines, it’s like having my own archive or library. I can go back and look at stuff and go, “What was on your mind that you didn’t use that before?” There are different mechanisms of just being open to looking at things and playing with them as a way of working.

The day-to-day of what one does, business stuff or emails, all of that is analytical thinking. I try to really shut off all of that because that does get in the way of my ability to be able to imagine or to play in a way. And that’s an important part of finding a subject or finding a way in.

Paulette: Are there certain activities or environments that help you to generate ideas?

Lorna: I think a lot of it comes from culling and collecting old photographs of all different kinds, from the 1800s to almost the present, that can serve as a vehicle of inspiration in thinking about how to put things together. That kind of goes across all disciplines, in a way. So I would say, in terms of what inspires me or things that speak to me, it really is photographic language or vernacular photography that I glom on to and find really interesting, and therefore, looking at those things creates ideas to make different kinds of projects.

Paulette: Do you have a particular rhythm to your working day?

Lorna: I work really intensely, and then I like to take breaks. I don’t really work 365 days a year. I need time, as the most important thing is to be immersed with ideas, but also I like stepping back a bit. So the work goes in cycles. I will look back at work that I did over a five-year period when starting a new cycle just to see different things that I might not have seen before that speak to me differently now in the present. It’s kind of like casting a net in a way sometimes and seeing what happens in terms of my imagination or where the ideas go.

Paulette: I’m always interested in an artist’s obsessions. Do you think there are questions that you consciously or unconsciously return to in your work?

Lorna: I think the idea of identity or persona is interesting to me in that it is malleable and fluid. And that has always been part of the work in terms of [thinking about] who gets to determine who we are. Do we get to determine that, and what are the parameters of that, given the society that we live in? I would say maybe my work in the 1980s and 90s was really questioning and thinking about those things.

I guess one obsession is these Jet magazine pin-up calendars, maybe like a 40- or 60-year period of these crazy calendars. I’m looking at them, but also kind of supplanting them where I’m making these collages where the parts of the body are taken out [of the original image] or objects are taken out, and [the image becomes] what’s left. Or what gets revealed in these collages is a woodblock print from the 1800s of the universe or a pattern of stars in the sky over particular periods of time.

A lot of the collages are not very complicated to me. They’re very simple juxtapositions. The activity of making them opens up my imagination or frees me from more analytical thinking, which is also present in the work, but [this practice also] allows the making of decisions that are just intuitive. I like that as a part of my practice because it prevents me from going down the road of being analytical as the only way that I interact with the work.

Paulette: As a Black woman, those images feel so familiar to me. Can you say more about taking those images of Black popular culture and making them part of your work?

Lorna: Within the context of those magazines, there is a repetition of people that are used or models that operate in different kinds of ads over a course of time. They change and they shift and they have different looks. You can see the mores at the time in terms of fashion and appearance and how that shifts . These are photographs of people, but these people are models and so they are creating a fiction.

I think in much of my work there is this fascination in terms of photography, where fictions are being created, but that we take as having a particular meaning or some kind of autobiographical underlying narrative. And I kind of argue that, no, it doesn’t have that, but that we can project those things on it. That’s why [I don’t use] a lot of images of famous individuals because I wanted to operate with familiarity but actually it’s an unknown subject.

I would say a little bit of the obsession with portraiture is that it reveals something, and I always argue that it doesn’t really reveal much. It reveals maybe more about the culture we live in than anything about the individual.

Paulette: I’m thinking about the paintings and the collages, and I think there’s an interesting tension at work of choosing what to show and reveal in terms of the way the layers are arranged.

Lorna: Probably all of the images are constructed from bits and pieces of old photography or music, magazine ads. But in their totality, they’re a fiction. I think the [intent of] layering is to make it complicated, in a way that it’s not a singular image, and you can sense that there is more than one face that’s present in some of the special character paintings. There’s more than one face. There’s more than one view. I wouldn’t say that I am trying to obscure or hide something or reveal something, but more that there’s a kind of complexity in looking.

I think people, in terms of anything that has a kind of photographic feel to it, want to find something in it that they can identify with as a person or a particular individual that’s being displayed. It’s fun to kind of play with these images. That takes them out of a singular portraiture mode. Maybe metaphorically it has something to do with the idea that we all have these multiple sides or multiple expressions or facets to who we are.

Paulette: How do you think the landscape for Black women artists has changed since you first started your career, if at all?

Lorna: The confounding thing looking back at the work is how much pigeonholing went on in terms of the kinds of reviews, reading the work in a very superficial way to fit certain kinds of agendas. That stands out to me really prominently when I look through reviews and stuff, how inaccurate they are. They’re not really looking at the work at all. They’re really just going in for a kind of generalist thing.

I think that there are so many more younger writers and curators that are part of the art world at this point and that their voices are also very important because of the kinds of questions that they will ask. Also, they are part of looking at that history of reviews, of dismissals, of narrow thinking that leaves out entire areas of curiosity and insight in terms of artists’ work. I am heartened by the fact that there are so many more Black writers and curators. Not everyone can speak in dissertation terms or eloquently about their work. Is it really important for them to do that? Not everybody wants to or may even be equipped, but that does not diminish the work. So then how does that work get supported and held in a way, stewarded, given that not everybody can speak about their work like graduate students?

I think, hopefully, there are many different ways that artists of color are allowed to engage and that they are not predetermined to just engage in terms of being a self for a social issue but that their imagination and who they are are also in the work. There shouldn’t be these kinds of prescribed boxes to fit artists of color into.

Paulette: Is there anything you wish you’d done differently as a younger artist?

Lorna: I think with regard to being a Black woman artist, and I say that specifically, I had to make decisions about my career. I had to determine its direction, what I wanted, when I wanted to leave galleries, do other things. I was always very committed to that, grateful that I was not afraid to displease. I’m grateful that I was not afraid of speaking my mind.

I’m grateful that I was not afraid of speaking my mind.

Lorna Simpson

In terms of the trajectory of all of those things that are really important in terms of sustaining a career overall, you got to be willing to be problematic for people. You have to be willing to be able to say, “No, that doesn’t work for me.” Now with younger artists, they’re led to believe that certain opportunities are the “in,” that they must act that particular kind of way, or those opportunities are non-negotiable, right? I see time and time again that they feel boxed in, or there’s a scarcity mentality of like, “Oh, but I have to do this this way.” And like, “it doesn’t work, but I’m gonna do it anyway.” Where, in fact, they could lean back a bit and state what it is that they want, without fear. Yes, things may get derailed, but you can’t fear that. I’m not saying everything is within their control, but they do have a personal power.

I always found myself having a community of artists around me, a community of writers, musicians, visual artists of all sorts, and people striving to make their way with the work that they believed in. Being a part of that, seeing that as a young person was very validating. Like, yeah, you should go for it, and don’t be afraid to be told no. Don’t be afraid that you may be problematic in speaking your mind or speaking about what you want.

I always saw my career as something that I needed to manage, right? I saw myself as a steward of my own work. It’s my own responsibility to the work and myself. I’m getting out of graduate school and not having any response to my work in terms of my review, or with professors at the time of defending my thesis. Everyone was very quiet, which perturbed me. I was a little bit like, “What the fuck is that about?” Because these are people who talk a lot and have a lot to say about a lot of things. So I left and went back to New York and put together a little portfolio, and immediately there was a response to the work in terms of institutional support, in terms of museums, and curators. Those early experiences, being around and seeing how other artists operated, I knew I had to be responsible for what was written about my work, who I was in conversation with. Because at the end of the day, that’s the kind of thing that lasts, that’s the thing that’s out there. I was careful not to relinquish that control and did that as a young artist a lot. To many people’s displeasure. But I think that that was important, and I’m glad that I did it.

There are plenty of things in terms of making space for the career, but also in terms of writing and content, that I can’t control, like if someone writes a review, that’s fine. I don’t try to manage outside of my own purview. But if it is within my own purview, then I do.

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For more of Simpson’s work, visit her site. She was also included in Phaidon’s recently released Vitamin C+: Collage in Contemporary Art, which is available now on Bookshop.