Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Lorna Simpson is a celebrated photographer and multimedia artist. Her work is staged with care. Take Five Day Forecast, five pictures of a Black woman's torso that shifts slightly. Each is labeled a day of the week, and underneath, there are words like misinformation, misidentify, misdiagnose, misfunction, or take her work, Wigs, consisting of 20 images of wigs coupled with text explaining why the wigs were important to the wearer. Her works have appeared at major art museums around the world: the Walker, LACMA, Rijksmuseum, MoMA.

I could keep going, but about 10 years ago, Lorna began using her creative mind towards something new. Well, it was old but new, painting. A new exhibition of her work just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It displays more than 30 works from 2014 to 2024, including a piece at the Met just acquired this year. The work is big and bold, and it looked like Lorna Simpson's work. The show is titled Lorna Simpson: Source Notes. Born and raised in New York, she joins us in studio now. It is really nice to meet you.

Lorna Simpson: Really nice to be here. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Originally, when you were studying back in the old days, and you went to SVA, you had to take a course in painting. Isn't that right?

Lorna Simpson: I did. As a foundation art student, you had to take foundation courses in painting and photography and sculpture. Yes, I did.

Alison Stewart: Why didn't you stick with painting? Why did you veer towards photography?

Lorna Simpson: Because I had so many friends who were so much better at it than I was.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Seriously?

Lorna Simpson: Seriously. Much faster, much more interesting. I found myself spending a lot of time in the darkroom and learning photography. I went by how much time I was staying with a particular activity, and that was photography.

Alison Stewart: When you decided to return to painting, what changed for you? What changed in the way you saw the world that you thought, "You know what, painting seems like the right idea now?"

Lorna Simpson: It started incrementally. I think I started making small drawings and collages and completely the opposite in terms of scale of what I normally do, but enjoyed in terms of my process as an artist, the intimacy of making something small, making something with your hands that just happens immediately as opposed to video. Then I thought about, "What would it look like, a large-scale version," and tried scaling it up, not with the idea that, oh, now I'm a painter and I'm making paintings for a show, but just as an experiment.

Alison Stewart: How did it feel to paint?

Lorna Simpson: Strange.

Alison Stewart: Strange how?

Lorna Simpson: It's a muscle, in a way, and kind of executing-- I had to think about releasing my control of how I thought it was going to come out or what it was going to look like. It's this kind of dance, in a way, between just making something and letting the process take over rather than trying to control it.

Alison Stewart: That must have been so different from your photography-

Lorna Simpson: Absolutely. Complete opposite.

Alison Stewart: -because you staged less.

Lorna Simpson: Yes, that's a correct term. Stage. Yes, absolutely.

Alison Stewart: You can stage your photography, but you can't necessarily stage how a painting's going to come out.

Lorna Simpson: You could try. [laughs] It may or may not come out, but that is very true. There's this intuitive way of working that I really enjoyed and just continued making it [unintelligible 00:03:37].

Alison Stewart: What surprised you about painting?

Lorna Simpson: How physical it is.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Lorna Simpson: I'd forgotten that. I do work large in terms of scale. For different works, the amount of time, and some of them are so large that they get painted on the floor, but the physicality of it, I did not realize. It is a very physical activity, which is quite wonderful.

Alison Stewart: Well, I was going to say this, the paintings are substantial. They're really rather large. How was it spending so much time on a painting when with a photograph, it can be-- It's not instant, but it's--

Lorna Simpson: No, there's an instantaneous-- You already have an expectation conceptually of what you're making, so therefore, it falls within the realm of forecast of what's going to happen, particularly the way I worked. This, on the other hand, presented so many accidents, or trying to retrieve it, or pulling back from adding too much. As I said before, kind of a dance between my hand and my intention in terms of the image and how the inks and the paint might apply or work on it. It was a thing of discovery and still is 10 years later.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Lorna Simpson. We're talking about an exhibition of paintings by Lorna Simpson. It's open at the Met. It's called Lorna Simpson: Source Notes. It's running through November 2nd. Many artists have rituals in their studios about when they paint. Do you have any rituals?

Lorna Simpson: Music.

Alison Stewart: What kind of music do you like to listen to?

Lorna Simpson: Well, it's funny. When I first started painting, my studio assistant, James Wang, and I would just play-- Now I'm forgetting, is it Frank Ocean, over and over to the point other people working in my studio were like could we change it, and we were like, "No."

[laughter]

Lorna Simpson: There is this thing. It is nice to have music and to have that be filling the space while I work.

Alison Stewart: How do you know when you're done for the day?

Lorna Simpson: That sense that if I continue, I might mess it up. When I get that sense of, "Don't do too much," or, "Take some time and look at what you're doing," then that's definitely the time to stop for the day.

Alison Stewart: Ooh. When have you seen something a couple of days later and thought, "Oh, wait, I need to change this now"?

Lorna Simpson: Sometimes, I can work on something that has a duration to it, but I realize when I dive in and I'm really working hard on something for days or just trying to control it, trying to make it different, it usually does not come out very well. It usually ends up being a painting that I discard or just so over. There's some balance between understanding that this doesn't work. That could be the image, that could be the way that I'm painting it, but there are moments that I've overdone stuff, and I was like, "Okay, that didn't help."

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: The title of the show is Source Notes. What does that mean?

Lorna Simpson: A lot of the material, visual material, and language that is part of the imagery is based on imagery from advertising, from Jet and Ebony magazines, mostly from advertising. The models, in some ways not celebrities or not well-known people that are amplified within the magazine, but what you might overlook, and in that way, I think my interest in archive and photography is part of that idea. That's the name of one of the paintings, the Source Notes.

Alison Stewart: The first painting you see if you come in one side is called True Value. It's this portrait of a woman holding a leopard on a leash, only the faces have been switched. It is a takeoff of a photograph you did that was like that. It was called the In Furs. Yes?

Lorna Simpson: From a collage. Actually, and now I feel bad because I don't have my material of it exactly, but it was a photograph taken by a well-known photographer, of course, whose name at this moment-- because I'm tired from last night, it was the opening, of a woman standing in a driveway with a tailored jacket and matching skirt that had a leopard pattern with a leopard on a leash.

I thought it was the craziest image that I'd ever seen in my life, and so I made a small collage. It's out of Jet magazine, it's really, really small, and just switched the face of the woman with the face of a cheetah. Then years later, I, in the process of making paintings, thought, "Oh, that would make an amazing painting. Let me try that image."

Alison Stewart: How did it work out? How did it feel to you to be able to see the picture to the painting?

Lorna Simpson: Again, the thing of scale, blowing it up doesn't necessarily mean that makes it more interesting. It is always a question. Although I love the collage and its intimacy and the simplicity of its absurdity, I wasn't sure that that would work once at a different scale and painted and made as though the image is like lurking in this darkness of a cheetah with a woman on a leash.

Alison Stewart: If you come into the gallery from the other side, you get to see Nightmare? which is also huge. It's the image of Carrie.

Lorna Simpson: Yes, from the '70s film, from a promotional still of Carrie in one of the scenes where she's in a nightgown. Again, I just switched one element of its eeriness of that image.

Alison Stewart: It was interesting to see them as bookends to the show. Did you plan it that way?

Lorna Simpson: I didn't plan it that way. Those two paintings were made around the same time. In a lot of these paintings, the figures are ghostly or this kind of half-human, half-animal in those early works. For the exhibition, in terms of walking through it, it becomes this kind of loop through.

Alison Stewart: The Met has just acquired a piece for its collection. It's titled Did Time Elapse. It's this large portrait of a meteor, a study of black and gray. What was interesting to you about a meteorite?

Lorna Simpson: Well, I did an entire show-

Alison Stewart: I saw it. Hauser & Wirth.

Lorna Simpson: -at Hauser & Wirth, November of last year. What was fascinating for me is, as humans, we have a fascination with things that fall from the sky and their meaning and what they mean. The inspiration was from a text from the Smithsonian clipping from a book that was talking about a particular fall in 1929, I believe, in Mississippi, where a white landowner is reporting that his Negro tenant-- observation of a meteorite that falls at his feet.

The amazing thing about that text is that you don't learn what the witness saw or what he felt about it. It's mitigated by the landowner. I take that text, and that becomes the violence for that particular time for Black people in Mississippi and this kind of phenomenon of a meteorite falling at this Black man's feet. Those two things that happen, that environment and something falling into that environment at his feet, I found a really interesting starting place to think about meteorites.

Alison Stewart: His name was Ed Bush.

Lorna Simpson: Ed Bush. Thank you. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: Yes. I read this on the internet, so it's the internet. Did you buy a meteorite on eBay?

Lorna Simpson: Yes, I did.

Alison Stewart: Okay. [laughs]

Lorna Simpson: Wait a minute, and you ask like, "How do you know? How did you know that was?" I used to collect rocks as a child and had a fascination with meteorites and with rocks of all sorts. I took a deep dive. There are different kinds of markings that look like fingerprints for certain kinds of meteorites. This particular stone from the photographs that I looked at had these markings, which is when the meteorite can still be intact, but entering into the atmosphere, it kind of has this dappled-- as though you made fingerprints or dappling on its surface.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Lorna Simpson. Her exhibition of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is called Lorna Simpson: Source Notes. It's running now through November 2nd. There's a painting titled For Beryl Wright. Would you explain who Beryl Wright is?

Lorna Simpson: Yes. My first exhibition, and I think I was maybe around 30 years old, and I had a quite large survey of my photographic work, Beryl Wright was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and she invited me to make this exhibition on my work with the catalog with Saidiya Hartman. It was a really amazing experience for me. Much like an artist seeing your work in a kind of context of a survey, it takes a moment to take that in. Through the conversations and the exhibition of the work, it really also changed the way I made work, that exhibition, after that point, which was amazing.

Beryl then died, I think maybe about 10 or 15 years after that. For me, in terms of curators and particularly Black women in the art world, the struggles of being chief curator, of having-- by institutionally supported for the work that they do but also supported-- I mean, my show was successful, but also supported for the course of their careers, that it's not just a one-time thing.

Beryl Wright is no longer alive in order to see many of the artists that she supported at the MCA and what has happened since, but thought while I was making these paintings, there were these two paintings that I needed to move to another part of the studio on an A-frame, which is this kind of rolling cart that you put paintings on and move them around the studio to make room for other paintings. These two paintings were there for months, just situated next to one another, and I was like, "I don't want to break them up. This is a beautiful diptych," and then titled it.

Alison Stewart: This is interesting because this brings me to a question which I tried to rephrase about four different times, and I'm not sure it makes sense. If it doesn't make sense, tell me to move on. I looked at all these paintings, and these women are appearing in various of your various paintings, and I wondered, did you envision the woman there, or were they a surprise to the viewer, or were you putting them there because they were always supposed to be there?

Lorna Simpson: I think it goes between ghosts and mirage or presence. All of them, in terms of this body of work, do have this presence. It goes in different forms of transparency and/or illusion. Why that is, they are always present in some form.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Lorna Simpson. You can see her work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is called Lorna Simpson: Source notes. There is a piece of sculpture, 5 Properties, over to the left-hand side. It's made of Ebony and Jet magazines, bronze, plaster, and glass. It's a table stacked with magazines. It's got a little figurehead on it, a little woman's figurehead, and underneath it looks like ice, but it's glass. Why did you want to include this in the show?

Lorna Simpson: Good question. I think the space, the Kimmelman Gallery at the Met, it's a long space. It doesn't give you a lot of opportunities to place a sculpture in it. It is in some ways a slightly difficult space. I think for the scale and the space that was allotted, it was nice to have because during this period of making a painting, I made collages, which are also part of the show, and also made a sculpture. It was a way, as a survey, to show a selection of maybe all these different bodies of work that happened over this course of time.

Alison Stewart: When people go see the show, and they should, where would you like them to spend an extra minute or two? What piece would you like people to--

Lorna Simpson: Oh, I can't direct that. I think it's amazing for people to come and to go see art and to spend any time of just looking, going with someone, and whatever draws them. I think the Met is so huge and encyclopedic and so many things to look at, that any kind of-- Even if people just walk in for five minutes and walk out, you never know what lingers two hours later in a conversation over coffee and that gets mentioned.

Alison Stewart: The exhibition is called Lorna Simpson: Source Notes. It's at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Thank you for making the time to be with us today.

Lorna Simpson: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.