1960-present
Works in the Collection
Biography
Lorna Simpson was born in 1960 in Brooklyn, New York. From an early age, her parents exposed her to the arts, taking her to museums, concerts, performances, and plays. In 1983 she graduated with a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, and in 1985, received an MFA in photography from the University of California, San Diego. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Simpson traveled to Africa and Europe and showed her work in solo exhibitions around the country. In 1985, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and in 1990, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. 1990 was an important year for Simpson, as she became the first African American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale in 1990, and the first African American woman to be given a solo exhibition at the Modern Museum of Art in New York.
In 2001, Simpson was awarded the Whitney Museum of Art Award, and in 2007, the Whitney featured a 20-year retrospective of her work. Her work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, among others.