LORNA SIMPSON (American, born 1961) Untitled (take a giant step), 2001 Archival gelatin prints under semi-transparent Plexiglass with black vinyl lettering in wooden frame 41 x 61 x 1" (104.14 x 154.94 x 2.54 cm.) Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery Sarah Norton Goodyear Fund, 2001

Since the mid-1980s, Lorna Simpson has been using photographs and language to make elegantly crafted art works that raise issues about gender and race. By combining images with text, she asks us to contemplate assumptions regarding racial stereotypes and gender inequities in our culture. Further, with a background in documentary photography, she also calls into question the "objectivity" of a photograph as well as hidden subtleties in the language we use. Yet while Simpson addresses these complicated political and cultural issues in her work, she never allows the combination of text and image to be reduced to a simple message. Her art is poetic and metaphorical, never direct or didactic.

This untitled piece is one of a series of twelve completed in the fall of 2001. It is composed of several almost identical photographic portraits of an anonymous African-American woman accompanied by text and framed and matted in semi-translucent Plexiglas. The silhouettes evoke historical modes of portraiture through the use of the oval-shaped frame of a Victorian daguerreotype and in the visual similarities to the ancient Egyptian bust of Queen Nefertiti. The arrangement of the images, in repetitive rows, calls to mind a cinematic storyboard or filmstrip. And the use of the translucent Plexiglas results in the images fading in and out of focus, a kind if visual equivalent of remembering. The text is culled from titles of paintings and films in which Africans or African-Americans are significant or involved in some way. Simpson’s background in art history, experimental film, and films of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, provided rich source material for the series.

- Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects