Skip to main content
Artist/Maker
Lorna Simpson
(American, born 1960)
Date1996
MediumPortfolio of 21 photogravures with text
DimensionsImage (Each): 7 × 5 in. (17.8 × 12.7 cm)
Sheet (Each): 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.3 cm)
Overall (Portfolio box): 10 1/2 × 8 1/2 in. (26.7 × 21.6 cm)
Frame (Each): 12 3/8 × 10 3/8 × 2 in. (31.4 × 26.4 × 5.1 cm)
Credit LinePurchase, William G. Roehrick ’34 Art Acquisition and Preservation Fund
Object number2016.11
Not on view
DescriptionAlthough Lorna Simpson initially trained as a documentary photographer on the East Coast, her decision to attend graduate school at the University of California, San Diego (where she earned her master of fine arts degree in 1985), introduced her to conceptual and performance practices that had emerged in Los Angeles in the 1970s. While her work consists primarily of still photography and film, it often verges on installation. Details is one example: it is a portfolio of prints designed to be framed individually but installed as a group (four of the twenty-one are illustrated here). The cropped images of hands that appear in the portfolio are all enlarged reprints of found studio portraits of people of color taken in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Simpson paired each image with a word or short phrase that appears below it, caption-like. The viewer is left to ponder the relationship between text and image: do the words describe the individuals
depicted? Are they meant to illuminate, or obfuscate? “What I’ve tried to do,” the artist has explained in relation to her photographic work, “is create contradictions—an edge between the subject and the interpretation about how a ‘subject’ is viewed or contextualized.” The present work calls attention to the assumptions we make about people on the basis of their physical appearance—even just their hands. The phrase below may support or challenge those assumptions, or perhaps seem completely unrelated. Printed in an edition of forty, Details is representative of Simpson’s works of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which tend to incorporate text and focus on Black bodies—often specific parts of the body, such as lips or hair, rather than the body in full. Elements of fragmentation and seriality are common, and meaning is layered. This portfolio, like much of Simpson’s oeuvre, is deeply concerned with personal versus historical memory. (SOURCE: Alcauskas, INNOVATIVE APPROACHES, HONORED TRADITIONS, 2017)
Portfolio of 21 photogravures with text printed on 30C (300 lbs.) Somerset paper.
Collections
Additional Details
Exhibition History
2017
Clinton, NY (Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College). "Innovative Approaches, Honored Traditions: The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Five Years, Highlights from the Permanent Collection," September 9 - December 10, 2017 (cat. no. 120, illus.).
Clinton, NY (Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College). "Innovative Approaches, Honored Traditions: The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Five Years, Highlights from the Permanent Collection," September 9 - December 10, 2017 (cat. no. 120, illus.).
Provenance
2016: Hamilton College (Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art), by purchase from Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston, MA;
2016: Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston, MA, on consignment by a private collector;
1996 - 2016: private collector.
2016: Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston, MA, on consignment by a private collector;
1996 - 2016: private collector.
Published References
Katherine D. Alcauskas, INNOVATIVE APPROACHES, HONORED TRADITIONS: THE RUTH AND ELMER WELLIN MUSEUM OF ART AT FIVE YEARS, HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION (Clinton, NY: Wellin Museum of Art, 2017), p. 262.
Signature
Signed "Lorna Simpson" on colophon page.
Carrie Mae Weems
Date: 1990 (printed 2010)
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Object number: 2011.5
Kiki Smith
Date: 1995
Medium: Ink on handmade Japanese paper
Object number: 1998.3.5
Robert Rauschenberg
Date: 1970
Medium: Offset lithograph
Object number: 1992.19
Firelei Báez
Date: 2013
Medium: Pigmented abaca, cotton, and linen on abaca base sheet with radiograph opaque ink
Object number: 2016.7
Silvia Taccani
Date: 1989
Medium: 12 Polaroid SX-70 prints mounted to mat board
Object number: 1991.218
Jeffrey Gibson
Date: 2015
Medium: Glass and plastic beads, tin cones, steel and brass studs, nylon fringe, and artificial sinew on repurposed wool army blanket, mounted on repurposed canvas punching bag with steel chain
Object number: 2016.5
David Kennedy Cutler
Date: 2011
Medium: Archival inkjet on Japanese paper, data of compact disks, and pigmented cotton
Object number: 2016.16
Garry Winogrand
Date: 1969, published 1982
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Object number: 1982.29.1