Lorna Simpson American, 1960- Lorna Simpson uses photography to invert cultural stereotypes about race, class, and gender by decoding and reordering visual and verbal languages. She began making traditional documentary photographs throughout the United States and Africa in the late 1970s. While in graduate school at the University of California, San Diego (M.F.A., 1985), Simpson began to question and challenge the objectivity of such images and to examine the ways in which these documents are generally perceived. Taking subjects from her own photographs and inserting them into stark backgrounds, she eliminated their contextual clues and instead juxtaposed her own texts and readings, often revealing racial and gender prejudices otherwise subsumed. In the mid-1980s, Simpson won international attention and critical acclaim for her series of large-scale black-and-white self-portraits. Photographing herself from the back, excluding her face and often juxtaposing the portrait with text and appropriated imagery, Simpson used her absence of self to comment on the exclusion of African Americans in history and culture. She continues to address these issues. Simpson (born in New York City) has received many awards and exhibited internationally. In 1990 she was the first African-American woman to be given a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has also been included in the Venice Biennale (1990) and the Whitney Biennial Exhibition (1991, 1993). Simpson lives in Brooklyn. A.W.