A consideration of the African-American artist's searching, philosophical work.

One of the leading artists of her generation, Lorna Simpson (born 1960) came to prominence in the mid-1980s through her photographic and textual works that challenged conventional attitudes toward race, gender and cultural memory with a potent mixture of formal elegance and conceptual rigor. Published on the occasion of her 2013 exhibition at Aspen Art Museum, Lorna Simpson: Works on Paper highlights four recent bodies of work on paper that explore the complex relationship between the photographic archive and processes of self-fashioning, including a new group of works being developed during her time as the AAM's 2013 Jane and Marc Nathanson Distinguished Artist in Residence. As in Simpson's earlier works, these new drawings and collages take the African-American woman as a point of departure, continuing her longstanding examination of the ways that gender and culture shape the experience of life in our contemporary multiracial society. This beautifully illustrated catalogue features new scholarship by New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als, MoMA Chief Curator of Drawings, Connie Butler, LACMA Chief Curator of Contemporary Art, Franklin Sirmans, and the AAM's Nancy and Bob Magoon CEO and Director, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson.

This comprehensive catalogue of Lorna Simpson's critically acclaimed 30-year body of work highlights her photo-text pieces as well as film and video installations to reveal how the artist explores identity, memory, gender, history, fantasy, and reality. Lorna Simpson is a conceptual artist who uses her camera and words to construct new worlds and deconstruct the worlds we know. This monograph opens with her earliest documentary photographs shot between 1978 and 1980, many never before exhibited, and includes her most recent works: large-scale serigraphs on felt and a work-in-progress video installation, Chess, in which Simpson herself, in a rare appearance in her work, recreates images discovered in an anonymous archival photo album. The book also features the photo-text pieces of the mid-1980s that first brought Simpson critical attention; stills from moving picture installations such as Interior/Exterior, Call Waiting, The Institute, and Momentum; and drawings related to her film and video work. Throughout the volume, Simpson's questioning of memory and representation is evident, whether in her moving juxtaposition of text and image, in her pairings of staged self-images with their sources in found photographs, or in her haunting video projection Cloudscape and its echo in the felt work Cloud.

"Black women's heads of hair are galaxies unto themselves, solar systems, moonscapes, volcanic interiors." —Elizabeth Alexander, from the Introduction Using advertising photographs of black women (and men) drawn from vintage issues of Ebony and Jet magazines, the exquisite and thought-provoking collages of world-renowned artist Lorna Simpson explore the richly nuanced language of hair. Surreal coiffures made from colorful ink washes, striking geological formations from old textbooks, and other unexpected forms and objects adorn the models to mesmerizingly beautiful effect. Featuring 160 artworks, an artist's statement, and an introduction by poet, author, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander, this volume celebrates the irresistible power of Simpson's visual vernacular.

In this bold rewriting of visual culture, Brooke Belisle uses dimensionality to rethink the history and theory of media aesthetics. With Depth Effects, she traces A.I.-enabled techniques of computational imaging back to spatial strategies of early photography, analyzing everyday smartphone apps by way of almost-forgotten media forms. Drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Belisle explores depth both as a problem of visual representation (how can flat images depict a voluminous world?) and as a philosophical paradox (how do things cohere beyond the limits of our view?). She explains how today's depth effects continue colonialist ambitions toward totalizing ways of seeing. But she also shows how artists stage dimensionality to articulate what remains invisible and irreducible.