Lorna simpson collages6/9/2023 We are compelled, always, by the phantasmagorical hair, which both invites and obscures. Simpson’s portraits invite us to look, by their sidelong glances or direct gazes. Featuring 160 iconic collages, Lorna Simpson Collages explores the beauty of black hair with visually-rich mixed media juxtaposed with vintage ads torn from old. But it is also a wash, a shadow cast over what we cannot know in these women. Watercolor is the perfect medium for Simpson here because of how it holds light and appears to be translucent. Black women’s hair is epistemology, but we cannot always discern its codes. It is forest and ocean, its own emotional weather. It is sinuous and cloudy and fully alive. The hair she paints has a mind of its own. Black women’s heads of hair are galaxies unto themselves, solar systems, moonscapes, volcanic interiors. In Lorna Simpson’s collages, “the black and boisterous” hair is the universal governing principle. Lorna Simpson and Elizabeth Alexander, Lorna Simpson Collages, San. THINK OF THAUMATURGIC LASS LOOKING IN HER LOOKING-GLASS AT THE UNEMBROIDERED BROWN PRINTING BASTARD ROSES THERE THEN EMOTIONALLY AWARE OF THE BLACK AND BOISTEROUS HAIR, TAMING ALL THAT ANGER DOWN. We start with the Book of Miss Brooks, and her poem, “The Anniad,” which casts the life of an “ordinary” black girl, Annie Allen, in epic scale and form:
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