Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Originally a documentary photographer, Simpson has received tremendous critical acclaim over the past decade for her conceptual, photography-based artworks. Much of her work confronts gender and racial stereotypes, often using the interplay of image and text as in Counting. Each of the three evocative images in Counting is paired with text referencing some type of counting such as measures of time, numbers of twists in a braid, or numbers of bricks in a structure. Her choices in cropping and framing the images of a black female body are non-traditional, but the black female presence is clear. Counting is in the collection of the Whitney Museum, Princeton University Art Museum, MOMA, Guggenheim, and others.
