Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson was born on August 13, 1960, in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, and grew up between Queens and Brooklyn. She attended the High School of Art and Design in New York, then earned a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in 1983 and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, in 1985.

She came to prominence in the mid-1980s with photo-text works that pair staged photographs, often of Black women shown from behind or with faces obscured, with fragments of language that unsettle fixed readings of identity, race, and gender. Her first solo exhibition was held at Just Above Midtown Gallery in New York in 1986. In 1990, she was among the first African American women to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, though some sources date this milestone to 1993. She was included in Documenta XI in Kassel in 2002 and was a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize, exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in 1998.

Over the following decades her practice expanded from photography into painting, collage, video, and sculpture, including the ongoing Earth and Sky series begun in 2016. A major traveling survey organized by the Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Haus der Kunst in Munich toured in 2013. In 2025 the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented a major survey of her work, and in 2026 the Pinault Collection opened "Lorna Simpson. Third Person" at Punta della Dogana in Venice, drawing on works from the Pinault Collection, private lenders, international institutions, and the artist's own archive. She lives and works in New York.

Museums and critics consistently frame Simpson as a pivotal figure in the shift from documentary photography toward conceptual, text-based image-making, using fragmented pictures of Black figures to interrogate how identity, memory, and history are constructed and withheld. That reading has carried her from her 1986 debut and the 1990 Venice Biennale through Documenta XI in 2002 to the 2025 Metropolitan Museum of Art survey and the 2026 Pinault Collection exhibition in Venice, honors that include the J. Paul Getty Medal in 2019. Her later expansion into painting and collage has been read by institutions as a continuation, rather than a departure from, the same inquiry into representation.

Simpson's recorded auction high is Day for Night, which sold for USD 375,000 at a Sotheby's New York sale benefiting the Studio Museum in Harlem on May 17, 2018. That result superseded an earlier record set only months before, when her work Cloud sold for USD 87,500 at Sotheby's in the same year. She is represented by Hauser & Wirth. Public auction volume for her work remains modest relative to her institutional standing, and her six-figure auction record is still a relatively recent development.

Simpson's institutional footprint, spanning MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Pinault Collection, is exceptionally strong for a living artist, and recent survey exhibitions have only deepened it. Her auction market, by contrast, is thinner and younger: her current record of USD 375,000 was set as recently as 2018, and public sales remain limited in number. There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne, so collectors should verify provenance through Hauser & Wirth and the artist's studio rather than relying on auction history alone.