ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

As a photographer and multimedia artist, Lorna Simpson has always focused on the personal and the political. And for Harper's Bazaar, she has created a new work that confronts the history of the pin-up girl, and its influence on the representation of the female body in art.

- KAITLYN GREENIDGE

I am nervous to speak with Lorna Simpson. Her work, ranging from photographic studies, of herself and other subjects overlaid with text, to films, drawings, and sculptures, has shaped so much of the conversation about Black womanhood, sexuality, and the body for the past three decades. Talking to Lorna feels, in my imagination, like talking to an oracle.

Then there she is, on Zoom from Los Angeles, detailing her time during the pandemic, which sounds so much like the experiences of so many people I know. It was about, she says, “attending to family and people around me”. When Covid-19 hit, Lorna was in LA, where she was preparing for a show. Usually in New York, she was unmoored from her main studio base. The 61-year-old artist, an influential creative force since first emerging on the scene in the 1980s, was forced to rethink how she approached making art. “I noticed I just need to be real present in whatever I am making,” she says.

The work Simpson made for Harper’s Bazaar is called Floating Actuality, a group of collages that play with her personal archive of pin-up photographs from old issues of Jet and Ebony magazines, and brim with the possibilities of the cosmos, referencing both the art history of the female body and the vastness of the Universe.