Some of our most interesting artists have one thing in common. They do outstanding work early on, then, rather than coasting by recycling that success, they complicate it, even change gears.The artist Lorna Simpson is one these restless souls, and she has the technical and imaginative chops to make major changes work, as is evident in a corner-turning retrospective of paintings, “Source Notes,” now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Simpson gained a strong reputation as a standout among a new generation of conceptual photographers and artists who — following “Pictures Generation” progenitors like Cindy Sherman a decade earlier — used photographic techniques somewhat the way painters used paint. Through a traditionally point-and-shoot, ostensibly reality-capturing medium, they created entirely fictional images.
Simpson began as a straight-up picture-taker. A native New Yorker — born in Brooklyn in 1960, and raised in Queens — she studied photography at the School of Visual Arts and initially identified her work with the genre of “street photography.” Graduate school at the University of California, San Diego, where Conceptualism was the reigning mode, added a new dimension to that early impulse. So was the perception that her career opportunities in the field were limited: “Being a Black woman photographer was like being nobody,” as she has put it. So she saw no reason not to experiment both with her medium and with the subjects that interested her, namely the politics of gender and race.
To that end she developed a studio-based style that combined staged images, notably shots of unnamed Black women posing in plain white shifts against a neutral backdrop, their faces turned away from the camera or out of its range, with results that evoke voyeuristic 19th-century ethnological documents, mug shots, and performance art stills. Most of these images have incorporated short texts that hint at explanatory narratives, some violent, without actually providing anything explicit.
Creating on aura of mystery has been her generative M.O., one she has applied to film and installation work as well as to still photography. What has changed in the past decade is her primary medium. Around 2014, she began, for the first time since her pre-art-school years, to focus on painting, and the Met exhibition is a tight but monumental survey of this new work.
The female figure is still a central presence, but now the image is largely archival in origin. In the process of cleaning out a family home after the death of her father, Simpson came across a storage box of old issues of Ebony and Jet, lifestyle and news publications that, since the 1940s and early ’50s, were staples of African American households, including her own.
From vintage copies Simpson has clipped headshots of women, many of them models in advertisements, who, unlike the studio subjects in her earlier photographs, look straight out at us. Using photographic processes, she has digitally enlarged these images and transferred them as screen prints to fiberglass panels. Some of the results, like the 2015 “True Value,” in which a woman wearing a leopard-skin patterned suit exchanges faces with an actual leopard, are jokily Surrealistic. Others, in which, using colored inks, she hand-painted over and around the faces, obscuring some features, highlighting others, edit and play with the female ideals that the magazine photos were intended to represent and promote.
More interesting, though, is the presence in the exhibition — which has been organized by Lauren Rosati, associate curator in the Met’s department of modern and contemporary art, in collaboration with Simpson — of a kind of poetically haunting imagery not previously associated with this artist.
The earliest piece here, dating to 2014, the powerful ‘‘Three Figures,” comes near the beginning of the show and delivers a visual and conceptual bang that reverberates, in various forms and emotional registers, through much of what follows. It’s a large, 12-panel ink and screen print work based on a 1963 news photograph of racist violence: an image of three figures desperately holding hands under a high-pressure blast of fire-hose spray during a civil rights demonstration in Birmingham, Ala.
Simpson’s approach is dramatically straightforward. She puts us right inside the blast, giving us a view of the world beyond it as it must have looked to those under assault: a blurry, volcanic chaos. On the painting’s right side, two panels slip down, as if dislodged by impact, breaking the chain of hands. Smears of thick dark ink choke up the top of the picture; below, ink washes streak down like tears.
There are other paintings on related themes. One, “Detroit (Ode to G.),” based on a 1967 news photo, shows the city caught up in a racial uprising and about to be engulfed in a tsunami of smoke. In “Polka Dot & Bullet Holes #2,” a collage-style piece, a female figure lifted from Ebony sits calmly, her face erased, atop a wall riddled with bullet holes, the pattern they make echoing the polka-dot pattern of her dress. The histories of American violence hinted at in Simpson’s early photography are made explicit here.
Elsewhere she has taken her recent research in sources further afield, in more abstract directions. Dominant in the show are excerpts from her recent series of large-scale “Ice” paintings, images of glacial landscapes derived from scientific photographs, and at least partly inspired by the story of Matthew Henson (1866-1955), an African American explorer who traveled with Robert Peary to the Arctic, and who claimed to have discovered the geographic North Pole first, with Peary getting the credit.
The series of mural-scale pictures Simpson has built around the Arctic Ocean theme adds up to a virtuosic performance, with its palette of varying hues and values of the color blue, and its oscillation between near-realism and near-abstraction, with the figure ever-present, if only partly visible.
In the 12-foot-tall vertical painting called “Night Fall,” which seems at first look to depict an entirely abstract subaqueous realm, a young woman — again, an Ebony visitant — stares out at us languidly, appraisingly. Once you spot her you get a sense that there’s some kind of story to be looked for here and you’re the one who’ll be writing it. And surely there’s one too in the smaller “Ghost Note.” This painting divides into two equal horizontal registers: sea and sky, with a woman’s head rising just above the waterline. Has she survived a wreck? Been thrown overboard and abandoned? (Almost inevitably allusions to the trans-Atlantic slave trade come to mind.) Whatever, her prospects look bleak. There’s no land in sight. The only solid object near her is an ominous looking small black box, which is out of reach and floating away.
All told, it’s as bleak as it is beautiful, this cold-power vision that Simpson is offering. And judging by the most recent work in the show, a 2024 painting called “Did Time Elapse,” it’s getting bleaker. The image, a realistic depiction of a scarred and chipped stone suspended midair, is drawn from a book Simpson (an habitué of eBay and thrift shops) found called “Minerals from Earth and Sky,” published in 1929 by the Smithsonian Institution. And the painting, part of a series, like the “Ice” paintings, packs a cultural back story.
The stone was a small meteorite that fell to earth in 1922 in Mississippi, its arrival witnessed by a Black tenant farmer working for a white landowner named Allen Cox. In reports of the incident, Cox’s name was cited, but the Black farmer’s name — Ed Bush, Simpson learned through research — was not. So, again, it’s a story of historical erasure along racial lines. And in that way it lines up with realities suggested by Simpson’s early conceptual work, in which Black figures are turned, faceless, away from us.
And like that subtle, idea-intensive early work, it’s about histories that are not going well. The actual meteorite that Ed Bush encountered weighed less than a pound. In Simpson’s painting, it looks crushing, a continent-size lethal weapon dropping through space. It’s one of this ambitious show’s single most powerful images, suited to a heading-for-a-big-crash time.
Lorna Simpson: Source Notes
Through Nov. 2, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, (212) 570-3951; metmuseum.org.
Holland Cotter is the co-chief art critic and a senior writer for the Culture section of The Times, where he has been on staff since 1998.
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