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, May 19, 2025)—A major presentation by New York–based artist Lorna Simpson is now on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and is the first exhibition to consider the entirety of her painting practice to date. Simpson came to prominence in the early 1990s 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 over the past decade: paintings that confront the complexity of identity and the indeterminacy of representation. Through more than 30 works, this focused exhibition presents a selection of Simpson’s major paintings, from her first work in the medium to an example from her latest series, along with related works in other media.
The exhibition is made possible by the Ford Foundation.
Additional support is provided by Hauser & Wirth, Jim and Irene Karp, The Deborah Buck Foundation, 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.”
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, added, “Over the course of her decades-spanning career, Lorna Simpson has continued to take creative risks, resulting in one ground-shifting practice after another. Lorna Simpson: Source Notes offers viewers the opportunity to explore the artist’s paintings on their own terms and consider their radical investigation into the politics of visibility.”
Throughout Simpson’s expansive practice, she has often sourced imagery and drawn inspiration from vintage Ebony and Jet magazines, 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 Claybord. These works dynamically collide figuration and abstraction with bodies that emerge and disappear, peering through 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.
Exhibition Overview
Upending chronology, the exhibition features several series that intersect and overlap, offering a layered view of Simpson’s creative process that mirrors her own approach of working simultaneously across different media and bodies of work.
At the 2015 Venice Biennale, just a year after producing her first painting, Simpson exhibited five monumental works that established her voice as a painter. One of these, True Value, opens The Met’s exhibition. It depicts a woman in leopard-print clothing holding a cheetah on a leash. Based on a collage Simpson produced five years earlier using an editorial photograph from Jet magazine, the work switches the faces of the woman and her wild pet. This approach is typical of Simpson’s collages: just one or two adjustments to an image are enough to estrange the viewer’s perception.
In 2010, Simpson began producing drawings and collages that replaced the hair of women pictured in magazines with gestural plumes of ink—a concept she later transferred to her paintings. Her Head On Ice series (2016–17) merges glacial forms found in archival image collections and portraits from Ebony and Jet. The exhibition includes two examples: in Head On Ice #4, a model’s styled hair becomes a jagged helmet of ice, and in Head On Ice #3, the melting iceberg nearly obscures her face.
Simpson embarked in 2016 on her Gradients series, a group of paintings in shades of gray that explores the shared history of violence in the United States. In Polka Dot & Bullet Holes #2, the polka-dot dress of a headless figure on the upper register seeps into a bullet-ridden panel below. The artist lifted the form from an editorial image in Ebony magazine but anonymized it by omitting the head.
For her Ice series, started in 2017, Simpson uses vintage photographs of glaciers and icebergs as the basis for imagined panoramas of the Arctic, sometimes incorporating screen-printed texts and images of partially visible women clipped from Jet and Ebony. All the familiar elements of the Ice paintings are contained in Ghost Note, but with the addition of a black square hovering on the horizon. For the artist, this “black box” operates like a container for memory. The form reappears in Simpson’s sole diptych, For Beryl Wright, dedicated to the late curator and scholar of the Harlem Renaissance.
In another ongoing figurative series, begun in 2016, women are cast at monumental scale. The exhibition includes two examples: Specific Notation and Night Fall, both 12-feet tall. The latter features a woman poised at the edge of an inverted waterfall; she is submerged in the cascade but also the source of its power.
Appearing at first to be individual portraits, the works in Simpson’s 2019 Special Characters series are composite images built up from several sources and washed with vivid inks. In Mind Reader, one woman’s gaze is disrupted by another’s face, while a figure depicted in Ink Drawn emerges from the surface like an apparition. The series fuses figuration with abstraction to highlight the instability of representation.
Simpson’s newest body of paintings—Earth and Sky, begun in 2024—centers on meteorites and is inspired in part by her recent collages incorporating star maps and rare minerals. In did time elapse, which was recently acquired by The Met, an imposing meteorite is suspended in space. Rendered in black and silver, the palette recalls both the iron-flecked rock and the photographic process that produced the source image.
Simpson continues to produce cut-paper photo collages in parallel with her painting practice. The exhibition features a series of related collages and sculptures to represent the diversity of her practice and show how the source materials that drive her paintings manifest in different mediums.
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 early 1990s, she was already considered a pioneer of conceptual photography. She went on to create 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 is accompanied by a major scholarly monograph. The first book dedicated to Simpson’s paintings, it includes contributions by Lauren Rosati, Hilton Als, David Breslin, and Adrienne Edwards. It is published by The Met and distributed by Yale University Press.
The catalogue is made possible by The Mellon Foundation and Allison and Larry Berg.
The exhibition is featured on The Met , as well as on social media.
##
May 19, 2025