The Met Fails to Honor Lorna Simpson as an Exceptional Painter

Lorna Simpson’s paintings draw you right in, their rich blue tones washing over you like a cresting wave. From far away, her largest paintings, measuring nearly 10 feet tall, can appear cool, even a little foreboding, but upon closer inspection, they offer much to admire. You can marvel at the painterliness of these works—their trailing drips, their swooshed strokes made by a squeegee.

But these surfaces seem to hide more than they reveal. In some sections of her paintings, she embeds strips of illegible text or the barely visible images of women’s eyes, gazing back mirthfully. Those details are what make her work so alluring. I keep coming back to a blue-gray cloud of smoke or mist in the corner of her diptych For Beryl Wright (2021), and I keep thinking I see the faintest semblance of mouth, smirking in the fog. It’s that enigmatic quality that makes her paintings tick.

For Beryl Wright, dedicated to the late curator who championed Simpson’s work early on,is one of the more than 20 paintings in the first exhibition to survey Simpson’s output in this medium. Those paintings span a decade of production, between 2014 and 2024, and are on view through November 2 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in a show titled “Source Notes,” a nod to the reference images that animate her practice. The exhibition aims to give an overview of her painterly practice, while also relating it to her collage work.

Even despite having worked as a painter for a while now, Simpson remains best known as a photographer. She made her name in the 1980s with works that married images of Black women with cryptic texts. These works force viewers to question their own preconceived notions while also never fully revealing what they mean. And so, when Simpson debuted her paintings at the 2015 Venice Biennale, organized that year by her friend, the late curator Okwui Enwezor, it came as a surprise to some. The Met show makes the case that these works were merely a continuation of what she’d started in photography.  

The exhibition successfully accomplishes the goal of showing how her collages inform paintings—two vitrines with her collage work make clear there is fluidity between the two practices. But the show doesn’t feel big enough or comprehensive enough to entirely make the case for Simpson as a great painter. Museum exhibitions always leave a lot on the cutting room floor, but in this case, doing so does a disservice to the artist surveyed.

This small grouping of monumental paintings feels cramped, without the necessary room to breathe. And the selection of works by curator Lauren Rosati also seems random. There’s only one work, for example, from a series about meteorites that was recently on view at Hauser & Wirth, in one of the most significant New York exhibitions of her paintings to date. That work, did time elapse (2024), is from the Met’s own holdings; it also happens to be the least interesting of the bunch.

The catalog features images of works that are more useful examples of her practice than what’s on view in the galleries. One explanation is, of course, the spatial constraints: the Simpson show is much smaller, for example, than a blockbuster exhibition for John Singer Sargent (on view in the spacious upstairs galleries through August 3). That speaks to the Met’s priorities. Thankfully, this will be the last exhibition the Met mounts in this space, as it prepares for construction on its forthcoming $500 million Tang Wing, though that won’t open for another five years. 

Simpson absolutely deserves a show that can take her seriously as a painter, but the Met show fails her. Its primary focus is to survey her usage of blue and to show off the monumental scale of her paintings, yet it isn’t very convincing in that way. I found myself drawn to more modestly sized works such as Ghost Note (2021), which features a black square to one side. References to art history and Black culture abound in Simpson’s oeuvre, and the allusion to Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) is obvious. Simpson, however, sees these “black boxes,” as she likes to call them, as “a container for memory, … a ledger to hold the past and mark the unreliability of its recall,” per Rosati’s essay in the catalog. That these containers are blacked out and obfuscated only adds to the poignancy of this metaphor: what and how do we remember—and to what extent? That the painting is relatively small compared to the rest suggests that this work can itself be easily overlooked.

Simpson’s best painting remains her first foray into the medium, Three Figures (2014). Here, three figures at the center of this composition are drawn from a famous 1963 photograph depicting a high-pressure water hose being turned on civil rights activists in Birmingham, Alabama. The visible Ben Day dots and marble-like swirls of black and white add to the fuzziness of the tableaux. Most interestingly, Simpson has offset the rightmost three panels, breaking the chain of linked arms. You can see the promise of her experimentation—and get the sense that this artist had made a big pivot and actually pulled it off.

Simpson used this approach of collaging and abstracting history again in Detroit (Ode to G.), a 12-panel painting from 2016 that hangs next to Three Figures at the Met. One of the source images is a view of the 1967 Detroit Uprising. Something has happened here, but what? The city might be on fire; perhaps the fog of memory has muddied the scene.

But in Simpson’s hands, violence isn’t replicated—it’s abstracted, though not in a way that turns away from history’s most brutal moments. Her use of multiple panels is important. It creates a jumbled experience in which memory is cloudy and refracted. There are streaks of black, as though these were only partially remembered images. Some traumatic memories never fully come together, just like Simpson’s paintings.

Her exploration of history grows subtler in the works that come next, as she mines references that themselves are obscure and underknown. Both her “Ice” and meteorite paintings allude to underknown histories about Black men whose contributions to science, both large and small, were at one point purposefully erased, only to be recently resurrected. The “Ice” series, featuring images of Arctic vistas, refers to Matthew Henson, an African American explorer who discovered the geographic North Pole in 1909 but whose discovery was largely credited to the voyage’s white commander, Robert Peary.The meteorite works refer to Ed Bush, a Black tenant farmer who discovered a meteoric stone in 1922 in Mississippi but went unnamed in the account reporting its discovery; the farm’s white owner, Allen Cox, was thanked in the historical record for its discovery as it fell on his land.

The only meteorite painting in the Met show, did time elapse, sizes up a stone that weighed less than a pound to be more than 10 feet wide. As groundbreaking objects go, the stone was miniscule, but Simpson has rendered it at the scale of history painting. In diving deep into the archive, as a collagist might do, Simpson is able to extract the essence of these stories, showing that though they seemed miniscule, they are actually important. The irony of the Met show is that it accomplishes the opposite: it has the feeling of being a major show, but it diminishes the work.