Works on Paper

Lorna Simpson: Works on Paper is a catalogue published by the Aspen Art Museum with essays by Hilton Als, Connie Butler and Franklin Sirmans. It focuses on Simpson's drawings, collages and prints, the works on paper that sit alongside the photography and film she is best known for.

Simpson made her name in the 1980s pairing staged photographs of Black women, often shot from behind or with faces excluded, with printed text that complicates or contradicts the image. The works on paper collected here carry that same interrogation of image and language into a more direct, hand-made register: collage, drawing and ink applied over found photographs and printed matter.

Als, Butler and Sirmans each write from a different angle, on Simpson's relationship to text, to the history of Black portraiture, and to the museum's own collection. Together the essays argue for the drawings and collages as a body of work in their own right rather than a footnote to Simpson's photographs and films.