Collages

A dedicated volume of Lorna Simpson's collages, gathering the works on paper in which the American conceptual artist cuts her source material from the pages of vintage Ebony and Jet magazines, crowning found portraits of Black women and men with ink-washed and watercolor forms.

Published by Chronicle Books in 2018 with an introduction by the poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander, the book presents the collages plate by plate. Hair is the recurring site of invention: advertising heads from mid-century print culture sprout galaxies, geological strata, and abstracted coiffures, turning the archive of American image-making back on itself.

Simpson (b. 1960, Brooklyn) came to prominence in the 1980s with photo-text works interrogating race, gender, and representation the collages extend that inquiry into found material with the economy of gesture that defines her practice across photography, film, and painting.