Exhibition Dates: May 19–November 2, 2025
Exhibition Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, The Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Gallery, Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, Floor 1
(New York, October 16, 2024)—In May 2025, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will open a major presentation of work by New York–based artist Lorna Simpson, the first exhibition to consider the entirety of her painting practice to date. Simpson came to prominence in the 1980s with her pioneering approach to conceptual photography. Since then, she has produced works in multiple media that continue to probe the nature of images and how they construct meaning. Lorna Simpson: Source Notes focuses on a significant new development in her work of the last 10 years: paintings that advance her incisive explorations of gender, race, identity, representation, and history. Through more than 30 works, this focused exhibition presents a selection of Simpson’s major paintings, including examples from her acclaimed Venice Biennale debut in 2015 and her celebrated series Special Characters, along with recent sculptures and related collages.
The exhibition is made possible by the Ford Foundation.
Additional support is provided by Jim and Irene Karp and John and Amy Griffin.
“Lorna Simpson is one of the most incisive and nimble artists of her generation, working with ease and impact across multiple media. For nearly four decades, she has been an incredibly influential figure in contemporary art, both internationally and locally, and The Met is proud to focus on and celebrate her exceptional body of paintings," said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. "Produced over a span of 10 years, the works prove how boldly she has challenged the boundaries of painting and how the medium continues to be a fertile testing ground for her ideas around the construction of identity and the image as a form of representation.”
Throughout Simpson’s expansive practice, she has often sourced imagery and drawn inspiration from vintage Ebony and Jet magazines (icons of culture in contemporary America), as well as the archives of the Associated Press and Library of Congress. Simpson incorporates her findings into screen-printed collages with washes of ink and acrylic on fiberglass, wood, or clayboard. These works dynamically collide figuration and abstraction with bodies that emerge and disappear, peering from inky surfaces or dissolving into landscapes of melting ice. They use found images—the artist’s “source notes”—to generate visual power, exemplifying Simpson’s skillful blurring of genres.
About the artist
Lorna Simpson (born 1960) received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. By the mid-1980s, she was already considered a pioneer of conceptual photography. In the mid-1990s, she began creating large multipanel photographs printed on felt that depict the sites of public—although unseen—sexual encounters. Over time she turned to film and video works in which individuals engage in enigmatic conversations that seem to address the mysteries of both identity and desire. Throughout her career, Simpson has questioned memory and representation, whether in her moving juxtaposition of text and image or in her large-scale video installations. Using the camera as a catalyst, she constructs work that comments on the documentary nature of found or staged images. Her latest paintings use hazy ink washes to present isolated figures amid nebulous spaces—a return to and departure from her earlier figures in a deepened exploration of contemporary culture.
Her works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Haus der Kunst, Munich, among others. Important international exhibitions have included the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany; and the 56th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. She was awarded the J. Paul Getty Medal in 2019.
Lorna Simpson: Source Notes is organized by Lauren Rosati, Associate Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art and Research Projects Manager in the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Met, in close collaboration with the artist.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a major scholarly monograph. The first book dedicated to Simpson’s paintings, it will include contributions by Lauren Rosati, Hilton Als, David Breslin, and Adrienne Edwards. It will be published by The Met and distributed by Yale University Press.
The catalogue is made possible by Allison and Larry Berg.
Additional support is provided by the Forman Family Foundation.
The exhibition will be featured on The Met website, as well as on social media.
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October 15, 2024
Contact: Alexandra Kozlakowski, Ann Bailis
Communications@metmuseum.org
Lorna Simpson (American, born 1960). Night Fall, 2023. Ink and screenprint on gessoed fiberglass, 144 x 102 in. (365.8 x 259.1 cm). Private Collection. Photo by James Wang. © Lorna Simpson / Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth