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Jun 04, 2025

How Lorna Simpson Broke the Frame | The New Yorker

Lorna Simpson found the meteorite on eBay. “It was for a great price,” she told me, declining to give the exact figure, though she later admitted that it had cost about six thousand dollars. The

Lorna Simpson found the meteorite on eBay. “It was for a great price,” she told me, declining to give the exact figure, though she later admitted that it had cost about six thousand dollars. The seller was “some guy upstate” who’d never listed anything comparable and provided no proof of its celestial provenance. But when it was finally delivered—to her airy studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where I’d come to see her on a February afternoon—magnets clung to its dimpled surface. “I’ve got this idea—it’s meteorites! ” she mimed telling her gallery, Hauser & Wirth, affecting the voice of an exuberant naïf. Simpson knit her eyebrows: “They were, like, ‘O.K.’ ” She began screen-printing photos of meteorites onto fibreglass panels, then painted over them in silvery hues. Last November, she exhibited the results in a show called “Earth & Sky,” placing the meteorite itself in a corner of the gallery.

Simpson is contemporary art’s astronomer of the archives, always searching for the dark matter that “documentary” images conceal. This most recent suite was inspired by a photo of a meteorite in an antique geology textbook, whose caption described its near-collision with an unnamed sharecropper in nineteen-twenties Mississippi. His strange destiny—chosen by the heavens, erased by Jim Crow—obsessed her. Now a work from the series has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and will feature in its retrospective of Simpson’s paintings later this month.

“I look for an image that’s already crazy, and then just do a little bit more,” she said over pastries, handing me a Jet pinup calendar from 1972. Like Mitt Romney, Simpson keeps binders full of women. Some of her paintings begin as digital collages sourced from vintage Black magazines; this calendar’s smiling, topless cover model had accessorized her lingerie with a bandolier of bullets, as though in preparation for the revolution.

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We were seated on a couch surrounded by old books and mineral specimens, an island of clutter and coziness in a sparse, white-columned expanse. Paintings leaned against the wall to one side. On the other, beneath a wide window with a view of the Manhattan skyline, a collaging table was heaped with paper scraps. Miss Black America, in a fur stole, advertised sparkling wine; near a clipping of an African sculpture, wig models beamed. With scissors and glue, any one of these might become a sky goddess or a chimera, acquiring that aura of mysterious privacy which has been Simpson’s trademark since the nineteen-eighties, when she broke out with a series of photo-texts depicting Black women whose faces never appear.

They were clean, placeless silver-gelatin-print portraits, taken from behind or from the neck down, or substituting isolated body parts for absent figures. Their fragmentary captions undercut reflexive assumptions; in the words of the artist and writer Coco Fusco, they “came to stand for a generation’s mode of looking and questioning photographic representation.” Perhaps the most celebrated is “Waterbearer” (1986). A young woman in a sleeveless white dress, her back turned to the camera, empties a silver pitcher with one hand and a plastic jug with the other. “She saw him disappear by the river, they asked her to tell what happened, only to discount her memory,” the caption reads. The image has become an icon of Black feminist self-reclamation. Refusing to accede the viewer’s curiosity while inviting speculation, it is also emblematic of Simpson’s singular slyness, which sets her apart from the contemporary efflorescence of Black portraiture that her work helped to inspire. “People are comforted by a rendering of a figure,” she said. “Nothing wrong with that. It satisfies a particular kind of desire around presence. For me? I like to complicate.”

Simpson is a slender, dark-skinned woman with angular cheekbones and heavy-lidded eyes, frequently narrowed in contemplation or amusement. She has a halo of springy black curls, touched with gray at the roots, worn in a bun at the studio. Glamorous yet chicly casual, she was dressed in silky sage trousers embroidered with dragons and indigo-stained Uggs. She speaks unhurriedly in a delicate, sweetly thickened voice, as if she’s just swallowed a spoonful of honey. But her hearty laugh drops into a lower register—as when she confessed to accidentally skipping an appearance at a commencement ceremony headlined by Michelle Obama, which she forgot about amid a divorce-related ordeal. Her right arm is inked with sinuous tattoos from Tahiti, where she vacationed after the separation; one constant of her practice is a readiness to move on.

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“I try to be very open, as though someone else is coming to me with an idea and I have suggestions,” she told me, describing the sleight of mind that she uses to go beyond what “Lorna Simpson” would or wouldn’t do. Her themes have remained consistent—memory and its erosion, photographic artifice, and the construction of identity by linguistic and visual codes. But she’s explored them across a formidable range of media: video, screen printing, installation, collage, found photography, and, more recently, painting, which she took up in 2014.

She showed me a few of her newer works: women’s faces and Arctic landscapes, executed in a palette of pearls and cool blues. An enormous lapis-lazuli glacier was streaked with columns of newsprint. Beside it leaned a portrait that stitched together disparate models from Ebony magazine.

I asked about a piece, at least eight feet in height, that was facing a wall. Simpson swivelled it around with ease—her favored surface, fibreglass, is lighter than wood or linen and takes screen-printed images without warping. “It’s my masterpiece, which I’m not ready to reveal!” she said, raising a hand to her brow. “No, it needs to be covered over with gesso.”

Painting was, initially, humbling. The discipline intimidated her in art school, and even more so when she returned to it as a mature artist. A few early experiments started “weeping” at an exhibition, because some of her water-based inks wouldn’t cure on fibreglass. Yet Simpson shed no tears. She’s turned painting into a summation of her practice, creating monumental compositions that counterpose individuals with the frames imposed by nature, culture, and the cosmos. “There’s a circling back,” she said of the medium. “It’s also collage, it’s also silk screening. It’s a combination of all of these other things that I’ve done.”

Simpson hadn’t painted for a month when I visited. She’d been busy with preparations for the retrospective, and with checking on her house in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, where her daughter, Zora—an actor, model, and editor at the art magazine November—lives full time. (“She drives me everywhere,” Simpson told me. “I don’t know where anything is.”) She said that I might be able to watch once she returned to the easel, though it could easily become “a total nightmare.” For now, the sun was going down, and there was still time for a drink before dinner. Simpson tossed her things into a bag and made for the exit, pausing to glance at the meteorite caption, which she’d blown up and hung on the wall. She had restored the name of the once nameless sharecropper, Ed Bush, who “did not at any time see the stone until it hit the ground.”

“I feel very provincial about New York,” Simpson told me. She’d spent most of her life within a mile of where we were standing—an isle of sidewalk under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway where the bustle of the Navy Yard gives way to Fort Greene. She has lived in the neighborhood since 1988, when a gift of twenty thousand dollars from her grandmother allowed her to buy a Federal-style rowhouse that predated the Civil War. It took Simpson five years to restore it. “Everyone would say I was crazy, because I was living on the top floor and I had to tear out the staircase,” she recalled. “But I had a ladder.”

The home was just a few blocks from Lafayette Gardens, a public-housing development on Classon Avenue where Simpson was raised. It later became notorious for gun violence, but in her childhood it was filled with hopeful young families. “The projects were new,” she said. “I would take the elevator and go see friends on different floors.” She coveted the Puerto Rican girls’ First Communion dresses. Her own father, Elian—known as Chico—was a Cuban-born social worker; her mother, Eleanor, was from Chicago and worked as a hospital secretary. Simpson was their only child.

A family friend, Jacqueline McMickens, described Simpson’s parents as a vivacious, fashionable couple with sizable Afros who collected art prints, argued ceaselessly about Black politics, and threw memorable house parties. “We treated the kids like they were adults, which was probably to our detriment,” McMickens said. Her son Charles, who attended a small private elementary school with Simpson, recalled the freedom they felt in middle-class Black Brooklyn, where neighbors knew one another and celebrations often spilled onto the streets: “Nobody called the police.”

Chico and Eleanor immersed Simpson in the arts from a young age. “They weren’t going to pay for babysitters, so they just took me to everything,” she said. “I saw the first theatrical performance of ‘Hair,’ and they were naked. I was horrified!” Her talent was obvious from elementary school, when she traded tissue-box coupons for a Polaroid camera and constructed a model city out of spools. She also danced, joining a Lincoln Center youth program affiliated with Alvin Ailey, in a routine involving gold body paint and wigs. “Even at ten or eleven, it was, like, ‘This is so Vegas,’ ” she said. But something was off: “I realized that I wasn’t a performer, because I wanted to see what was happening onstage so bad.”

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In 1968, when Simpson was eight years old, the family moved to Hollis, Queens. “It was like going to the country,” she said. “People had back yards and grew flowers.” When she got into the High School of Art and Design, in midtown, the commute was two hours each way. She turned the distance into a social advantage. “I had friends who lived in Co-op City in the Bronx, the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side,” she told me. “The subway was our friend.”

At Olea, a Mediterranean restaurant near the Clinton-Washington G stop, Simpson fortified herself with a glass of rosé. “You asked about my childhood,” she explained. As a teen-ager, she often stayed out, partly to avoid her father’s violent outbursts—a memory she blocked out for so long that it fell to old schoolmates to fill in the gaps. “Your friends are the ones that remind you of who you are and what you’ve experienced,” she told me. “The psyche can only take so much.”

At seventeen, Simpson moved to Harlem and enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, where she meant to study painting before she was seduced by the darkroom. Considering a career in photojournalism, she took out extra loans to travel. Once, she drove a “teeny, tiny Fiat Cinquecento” with a boyfriend to the edge of the Sahara, where a scorpion sighting ruined an overnight stay with local nomads. “They were, like, ‘Oh, that’s no big deal,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘All you have to do if you’re stung is suck out the venom and pee on it.’ ” (She slept in the car.)

A summer internship at the Studio Museum in Harlem proved more inspiring. There, in 1980, Simpson met the conceptual artist David Hammons, whose ephemeral approach to art-making expanded her horizons. (She remembers him nailing bottle caps to telephone poles.) “New York became a sort of adult playground for me,” she said, describing nights out to hear poetry and see avant-garde performances. “It was so much more of an education than my education.” A frequent companion was Kellie Jones, a fellow-intern and now an art historian at Columbia. “We enjoyed thrifting together,” Jones told me—clothes, ceramics, mid-century-modern furniture. “Lorna was top-notch.”

They became lifelong friends. Jones often visited Simpson in California, where she’d been persuaded to enroll in U.C. San Diego’s M.F.A. program by the artist and photographer Carrie Mae Weems. Simpson and Weems shared a two-bedroom apartment with a balcony. “We’d come home from class, have a glass of wine, and brainstorm about all the knuckleheads,” Weems reminisced. The two took dance classes and made cross-border trips to Tijuana for coffee and flowers. “We looked out for one another, and we were almost the only Black women in our department,” Weems said. “The question that shook us and shaped us was, what was the meaning of representation?”

“Representation” had to do not only with identity but also with the formal relationship between life and art. U.C.S.D.’s faculty included many poets and performance artists of the nineteen-sixties vanguard, not least Allan Kaprow, whose zany public “happenings” revealed the constructed nature of social reality. Weems, like them, went on to use her body in her work. But Simpson felt alienated by the retired radicals—a cliquish, overwhelmingly white group—and their antics. “I was too introverted for all that,” Simpson said. “But I was interested in the performative aspect of work.”

Her thesis, a multi-panel piece called “Gestures and Reenactments,” explored the performance of race in everyday life. It shows a muscular Black man in a white T-shirt assuming six different postures. (He was a member of the water-polo team whose California physique threatened to short-circuit Simpson’s conceptualism: “As a New Yorker, I was, like, ‘There are humans that look like this?’ ”) The captions imply a vulnerability that complicated the stereotypes of Black masculinity: “Sometimes Sam stands likes his mother,” one reads; another alludes to the fear of being confronted by police. The result is a kind of anti-portrait, one that does not so much portray an individual as ask the viewer: Who do you think you’re looking at?

“I was so done with California, I didn’t even take pictures,” Simpson said of the work’s exhibition in an unused storefront. She was eager to return to New York. There, she’d already met artists like Hammons and Ana Mendieta, and, in 1986, she had her first solo show at Just Above Midtown, a gallery for Black contemporary art, featuring a series of photo-texts on folding screens. The city’s art scene was still largely segregated, and still suspicious of photography. Yet that was beginning to change. “They’d already had five years of Cindy Shermans and Barbara Krugers,” Jones told me. “But we were the women in these pieces,” she went on. “That was the exciting part.”

In an age of sensationalized Black hypervisibility, Simpson coolly dissected the assumptions embedded in both language and looking. A dark-skinned woman in white, reclining between the phrases “YOU’RE FINE” and “YOU’RE HIRED,” could evoke a catcall, an odalisque, or a clinical inspection. Another paired hair-braiding instructions with a triptych showing a woman’s neck from behind, her coiffure from above, and the inside of an African mask. The works suggested the rigors of taxonomy and anatomy, only to reveal that such systems fail to capture the lives they claim to classify.

Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum, encountered Simpson’s photo-texts in the Village Voice as a student at Smith College. “She was mining not just the written language,” Golden said, “but the spoken language”—drawing on folklore, news reporting, and Black vernacular idioms that went beyond the explorations of her white conceptualist peers. Jones introduced the two soon after Golden graduated. A few years later, as a young curator at the Whitney, Golden helped usher Simpson’s work into the mainstream—and later became her close friend and Zora’s godmother.

“Lorna makes place,” Golden said, comparing the opportunities that Simpson has created for a generation of Black women artists to the many gatherings she’s hosted. Golden recalled a New Year’s party that Simpson threw with the curator Okwui Enwezor in 2017. It was meant to be a small dinner party, but after a blizzard the guest list swelled to more than a hundred. Golden described guests clambering over snowbanks to make it inside, where they danced through the night and feasted on lobster, turkey, and crown rack of lamb. Simpson had come a long way, but in spirit, Golden insisted, the party wasn’t so different from those she’d once thrown at the unfinished brownstone: “Even in the days that we were climbing that ladder, Lorna made a space that we could all be in. And, yes, Lorna is renovating again.”

A few weeks later, I accompanied Simpson to the opening of a Jack Whitten retrospective at MOMA. The museum was thronged. In the lobby, a jazz band played; upstairs, an art-world Who’s Who took in Whitten’s mosaiclike abstract paintings. Golden held court in a corner; Jones walked up and gave Simpson a squeeze around her waist. A young curator named Thomas Jean Lax—who had recently mounted a show about Just Above Midtown—took her warmly by the hand, asking when her Met retrospective would open.

“May 19th?” Simpson replied.

Lax brightened: “Grace Jones’s birthday, Malcolm X’s birthday, and Ho Chi Minh’s. That’s good energy.”

Simpson twirled her index finger and did a little dance. “I’m glad I left the house,” she said. “And who wants to leave the house these days? Not I.”

She sidestepped a cluster of familiar faces and continued through the exhibition. Simpson marvelled at the disciplined breathing Whitten must have required to make such straight lines across one orange canvas, which reminded her of atmospheric heat waves. (He’d gone over it with a rake-like tool called the Developer, often comparing his process to photography.) Nearby was a painting that evoked a silhouetted head and shoulders: “Black Monolith II: Homage to Ralph Ellison the Invisible Man.” Whitten was deeply engaged in the struggle for Black liberation, but some leaders of the Black Arts Movement had little patience for artists who dithered around with shapes, colors, and concepts when they should have been representing Black lives.

It’s a false choice—abstraction versus representation, aesthetics versus politics—that Simpson knows all too well. By 1990, she had emerged as an art-world star, with a show at MoMA and a prime spot at the Venice Biennale, where my colleague Hilton Als, then writing for the Village Voice, favorably contrasted Simpson’s photo-texts with the L.E.D. texts of Jenny Holzer, who was representing the United States. “What the faceless woman with her back turned is doing in these pieces,” he wrote, “is finally turning her back in order to address herself.”

Few others crossed the color line to consider Simpson in such company. She was routinely identified with her models; a Newsday profile characterized her work as being about “what a tangled and terrifying thing it is to be a black woman.” Simpson was interested in race. Yet her focus was not self-expression but systems of meaning. “Wigs II,” a photo wall depicting dozens of hairpieces—blond bobs, Afros, and everything in between—contains no bodies at all. Other works were nearly Dadaist in their freewheeling associative play. But, as late as 2009, the Met omitted Simpson from a survey of the so-called Pictures Generation, which included Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, James Casebere—then Simpson’s husband—and not a single Black artist. She felt too little affinity with the group to care much. More lastingly troublesome is the general blindness to anything but race in her work. “Why can I not assume some universality around having a Black character?” she asked. “Everyone wants a mirror of themselves.”

Midway through the Whitten exhibition, Simpson’s progress was all but arrested by a carrousel of friends and fans. One was Glenn Ligon, dressed in brown corduroy—a Black conceptual artist of Simpson’s generation, who credited her with clearing a path for his own wily text-based work. Another was Rashid Johnson. Simpson seemed particularly excited to see the photographer Dawoud Bey, who’s spent a half century chronicling life on the streets of Black communities, mostly through dead-on portraits. They’d been classmates at S.V.A., and in 1992 Bey took a striking Polaroid of Simpson, her right eye glinting amid the shadows cast by her shoulder-length mane. Recently, though, he’s turned to photographs of forested scenes—and a professor and curator who knew the pair seemed skeptical.

“You threw me with the landscapes,” the curator teased Bey. “Trees! ” Artists, he went on—clearly trolling—ought to stay in their disciplines, if only to simplify syllabi. Simpson, who’d been side-eying the exchange, theatrically folded her arms. “You gotta get a grip, man,” she said. “Art is a lifelong activity. People make choices. You get to switch it up!” Everyone laughed. “I always tell people what I think. That’s why I get in trouble all the time,” the curator said, boasting that Whitten had once ejected him from his studio. Once he’d gone, Simpson turned to me and rolled her eyes: “Can’t you see why?” The vehemence reflected her own quest to outrun legibility, which propelled her beyond photo-text and into other orbits.

Six hands pulled a squeegee down the length of a table, pressing ink through a mesh screen onto a fibreglass board. Simpson gripped the tool from the left, shimmying backward in her teal Nikes. Her longtime printmaker, Luther Davis, knee-walked on the tabletop to steady its middle, while a colleague in blue gloves held the far end. When they reached the edge, they carefully lifted the frame. “Ta-da!” Simpson declared. “One swipe.”

A young assistant in a Lakers jersey blow-dried the composition: a dancer atop a platform, surrounded by ladders, with a cigar in her mouth and astronomical charts draped across her jauntily posed figure. It was a reproduction of a collage from a series called “Sky Pinups,” partially inspired by Zora’s gift of a book called “The Disordered Cosmos,” by the physicist and Black feminist writer Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. A construction tower behind the figure was from an article in Ebony, Simpson told me; the face belonged to the dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, and the starry raiment had been clipped from a nineteenth-century engraving. A pocket of air had left a white splotch—Davis fretted, but Simpson didn’t. “I’ll paint in the dots!” she told him, before turning to me with an explanation: “The aberrations become starting points I can play with.”

The printshop was at Powerhouse Arts, a Brooklyn nonprofit in a converted subway power station. A half-moon window looked out on the Gowanus Canal and the identical luxury condos rising around its stinking waters. Davis, who runs the shop, has worked with Simpson since the mid-nineties, when she began silk-screening cityscapes onto felt panels. Felt, he noted, was less forgiving than fibreglass: the ultraviolet dryer used to cure the ink would sometimes singe the felt’s edges. “They would curl up in the light and smell like burning lambs,” he told me.

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Simpson had grown bored with framing photographs, and the familiarity of her enigmatic figures threatened to blunt their unsettling effect. In her new cityscapes, which she pieced together in sections, she left people out entirely. But the felt’s furred obscurity conjured novel mysteries. “The more you get up close to the images, the more they fall apart,” Simpson said.

They were seamy in both form and content. For a series called “Public Sex,” Simpson blew up photos of places like parks, alleyways, an office building, and a museum gallery to wall size, captioning them with riddling erotic narratives that alluded to the city’s underground life. “I once almost went to a dungeon on Fourteenth Street,” Simpson told me, but she backed out at the last minute. More often, she went dancing in the meatpacking district, and hung out at Florent, an all-night diner in the neighborhood. Her depopulated tableaux also served as an elegy for the friends she’d lost to AIDS, and for the lives and losses that photographs of cities, like photographs of people, can’t quite contain.

As Davis power-washed de Lavallade off the reusable screen, Simpson settled into an armchair and reached into her formidable black canvas tote. “You wanna see?” she asked, pulling out a slim package. Inside were five wallet-size photos, probably from the nineteen-thirties or forties, of a Black man in a three-piece suit trying out various expressions. They were destined for one of her “photo booth” works: large, cloudlike arrays of found snapshots, drawings, and magazine clippings, each housed in a tiny custom frame. It’s as if the viewer were being asked to sort memory—nebulous, secondhand—into reality and invention. Simpson considered letting me watch her browse eBay: “Maybe you’ll make me lucky.”

Her art took an archival turn around the millennium, coinciding with the deaths of her parents, her marriage to Casebere, and the birth of Zora. The felt and photo-text works gave way to films and installations built from repurposed images and reënacted memories. “If you need to find something—something obscure, something that you can’t imagine—Lorna Simpson is who you call,” Golden told me. Once, Simpson offered to restore a photo album that Golden had inherited, in terrible condition, from her Jamaican grandmother. “She gave me back a museum-archive treasury,” Golden said.

Simpson, whose parents told her little about their backgrounds, has long been drawn to the memories of others. One of her most beguiling photo-booth works, “1957–2009,” began with a single snapshot: a Black woman, stylishly dressed, leaning against a mid-century car. Simpson liked it so much that she amassed nearly a hundred other photos of the same woman, sometimes along with a man. The pair appear in a series of flamboyant poses: noodling on a piano; smoking solemnly in front of art works; curtsying mid-phone call in a risqué nightdress.

Simpson came to see these photos not as candid moments but as the record of an elaborate performance—Cindy Sherman before Cindy Sherman. Defying her usual ban on appearing in her work, she decided to become the duo’s double, reënacting their “crazy narrative” shot for shot. “It took an entire summer,” she recalled, partly because she was so camera-shy. She bought wigs and costumes, and enlisted Zora—then still a child—to help set up outdoor scenes near the house she shared with Casebere in upstate New York. The resulting work includes both the original portraits and Simpson’s rendition.

It was a new and more impish kind of refusal—flaunting faces and poses while keeping the source material’s mystery intact. Around the same time, Simpson started painting small watercolor portraits, a respite from the logistical demands of film. Then, in 2010, she found a box of Ebony magazines that had belonged to her grandmother. She was riveted by the models’ stylized expressions—young women, posed within an inch of their lives, hawking jewelry, cosmetics, and hair-care products. She was drawn to the before-and-after shots, in which women were transformed into fierce “huntresses” or beaming “corn row cuties.”

Simpson began making collages, clipping out the women and giving them watercolor perms in “unnatural” shades such as lime green and violet. “It was a relief to not have to make sense,” she told me. Like the German Surrealist Hannah Höch, whose own collages she’d long admired, Simpson aimed for simplicity and strangeness. In one series, crystals replace hairdos. A pensive woman contemplates a lavender column of spodumene; another dreams up an unruly Afro of azurite malachite. It’s as if their inner lives had erupted, breaking through the glossy surface of bourgeois fantasy.

One especially arresting collage shows a pair of mascaraed eyes glaring from the shaft entrances of a graphite mine—the refusal to meet a gaze from without recast as a penetrating stare from within.

Simpson’s collages nearly always use found images, but she made an exception for Rihanna, who invited her to shoot her cover of Essence, in 2020. “There was a separate security detail for the jewelry,” James Wang, who works at the studio, recalled. Rihanna kept them waiting for seven hours. During the shoot, which went late into the night, Rihanna hovered behind Simpson and Wang, oohing and ahing as they edited in Photoshop. In the final image, the singer stares out from beneath a hairpiece made of sodium-chloride crystals—a heap of transparent cubes that echoes her diamond collar and suggests, perhaps, that she might be a bit salty.

The high-profile commission coincided with a broader resurgence of interest in Black portraiture. Many younger artists—some following Simpson’s lead—were probing the conventions of representation and remixing archival material in speculative ways. Most were painters, and Simpson, albeit somewhat unconsciously, joined them. In 2014, she began working on Claybord panels, sometimes starting with a silk-screened image, sometimes painting freehand. “She was very resistant to calling them paintings,” her studio director, Jennifer Hsu, said. Intensely private, Simpson often sneaked into her studio on weekends, when no one else was around.

Then, one day, her friend Okwui Enwezor visited. After seeing the new work, he invited her to exhibit in his edition of the Venice Biennale. He singled out “Three Figures,” based on a news photograph of civil-rights protesters being hosed by police. Simpson had broken the image across several panels and ringed it with runny black ink; he encouraged her to go even bigger, envisioning a series of monumental history paintings.

Simpson moved from wood and Claybord to fibreglass, which allowed her to scale up, and from hand-painted figures to screen-printed images layered with pigment. “It’s an overlay,” she said of her paint use. “I can obliterate parts or revert, make this part or the mid-tones a different kind of darkness.” Her series “Special Characters” enlarges and fuses the faces of different models making similar expressions, highlighting their subtle asymmetries—what might, at first glance, read as a lazy eye or a lopsided hair style—by framing them with contrasting squares.

“She leaves relics of the screen-printing process visible through these organic veils of ink and acrylic,” Lauren Rosati, the curator of the Met exhibition, told me. “You are always aware—even if the source may not be apparent—that images have been embedded in a surface.”

Time’s alteration of photographs and their associations is set in parallel with natural cycles. Around 2016, a poem about the Black polar explorer Matthew Henson by her friend Robin Coste Lewis—another maverick of the archives—helped inspire a series of paintings about the Arctic, which flood its frozen landscapes with electric blues. In these seemingly inhuman terrains, the figure coyly persists: a woman’s profile appears along the sheer side of a craggy peak; another’s eye peeks out from a crevasse.

Is Simpson carving out a space for Blackness in a realm long claimed by white explorers? Or is she critiquing what Toni Morrison once described as the conflation of Blackness and femininity with wilderness and its terrors? What do bullet holes, from an Ebony spread on gun violence, have to do with the polka dots on a model’s dress? The layering of contexts becomes as politically charged as their absence was in the photo-text works. Yet the lush, sensuous surface of the paintings shifts the focus inward.

Perhaps turning one’s back on the world, for Simpson, is no longer about exposing its assumptions but about opening a space for imaginative play. Asked about a recent glacier painting, she simply said, “I just enjoyed making that painting. It was really cool.”

I never did get to watch Simpson paint. The Friday I came to her studio for that purpose, she said that she’d been struggling, then whisked us off in her Volvo XC90 to an early dinner in Fort Greene. There was, as usual, no parking. A trio of middle-aged white pedestrians were saving a spot in front of an elementary school—not far from a house that was characterized, in a nineties profile of Simpson, as so dodgy that “the cabbie hesitates to discharge his fare.” Simpson accepted their apologies with a smile, rolled up the window, then exclaimed behind the wheel, “This ain’t the suburbs.”

Eventually, she dropped me off at a corner to scout a table. I stopped by four restaurants before I found one. There are downsides to growing up with the neighborhood, and the beloved haunts, the affordable brownstones, and the bushy-tailed young artists are—like David Hammons’s bottle caps—fugitive, alas, as the years.

Several days later, Simpson texted me snapshots of two new paintings—a glacier and a figure in a bikini wearing a costume tiger’s head. She’d used the acrylics sparingly: to tint the water blue, the fur orange, to cover the woman’s skin with stars. Whole swathes were left unpainted. Did she mean to keep going? I asked. Simpson replied with a string of emojis: “😳😂😂 they are finished,” and I winced at the faux pas. But, then, images in Simpson’s work rarely declare themselves finished. They flicker into view, like something falling through the atmosphere, briefly lit. ♦