In a concentrated show at The Met, Lorna Simpson lifts the veil on her conceptual photography practice and reestablishes the ubiquity of Black beauty magazines 

 

On the last Wednesday before school resumed for the fall, an eclectic group of Black women gathered on 5th Avenue for a field trip. One woman in a daishiki carried a handbag fashioned from recycled vinyl records; another woman wore a wide-brimmed red hat. It was easy to spot the group — a troupe of braids, afros, and twist-outs is a rare sight on the Upper East Side. Those in-the-know walked up with eager smiles. A few tardy attendees arrived panting, relieved they hadn’t missed the 11:00am meeting time. Once the group had reached a critical mass, the women ascended the stone steps of the Met skipping ahead of the usual lines because it was a Wednesday, the one day each week when the city’s most-visited museum is closed. 

 

The museum may have been closed to the public, but the group was ushered inside to start their private tour in the Thomas J. Watson Library, an art and art history research center tucked behind the marble patio from the Castle of Vélez Blanco. OlaRonke Akinmowo, a Civic Practice Partnership Artist in Residence and the creator and director of The Free Black Women’s Library in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, thanked the women for coming. This was the latest in a series of field trips she’d organized which invite anyone who’s not otherwise occupied on a Wednesday morning to join an ekphrastic writing workshop and a guided exhibition tour. 

 

 

Ekphrasis is writing — usually poetry — about art; attendees could opt for poetry, prose, or accept Akinmowo’s suggestion of magical realism. To practice, the women brainstormed a collective list of things that “are real but feel magical” which included trees and blooming flowers, art and ideas, tarot and synchronicity, and orgasm. The last one elicited giggles around the room. Next, they lined up to see their ekphrastic inspo, Lorna’s Simpson’s Source Notes.  

 

Lorna Simpson, a Black woman and artist born in Crown Heights in 1960, came “to prominence in the 1990’s with her pioneering approach to conceptual photography”. Traditional photography captures an image or a moment; some purists despise the use of photo retouching relying solely on camera selection and available light. Conceptual photography makes more room to play. In her first major solo exhibition in 1990 at MoMA, Ms. Simpson combined images and text to craft her vision. In “ID” (1990), there are two black and white photos: the left image labeled ‘identify’ depicts a braided bun woven in on itself, the right labeled ‘identity’ shows a black woman with short, curly hair photographed from behind. In Source Notes, Ms. Simpson lifts the veil for viewers to see where the images come from in the first place.

 

 

The group assembled at the front of the gallery where Antoinette Cooper, a contract educator with the museum, introduced herself and the exhibit. Source Notes has just over 30 pieces which makes it significantly smaller than a typical show at the Met (the 2024 Harlem Renaissance exhibition had more “some 160 works”, Flight into Egypt in 2025 had “nearly 200”), which Ms. Cooper explained encourages the viewer to focus and reflect. At 9 feet tall, Ms. Simpson’s “True Value” (2015) both dwarfed and welcomed the visiting group into Gallery 913. Ms. Cooper, wearing a white fedora and a white denim jacket over a white dress, asked the women to name what they saw with priority given to observations over analysis. 

 

Volunteers shared what they noticed: a cat with a woman’s face, a woman with the face of a cat, a leash, a dark background, brackets. Ms. Cooper was gentle when one participant jumped ahead — “I think it’s about the subjugation of women through fashion” — and advised that in the rush to make meaning we can miss out on details. Ms. Cooper also pointed out the ‘source notes’ in the painting. Simpson used brackets to frame the faces of the woman and the cat that she had swapped from their original places in a photo from a fashion magazine. The collage she used as an early model for the painting lay nearby in a glass display case. A stack of Jet and Ebony magazines atop a black metal stool (“5 Properties” (2018)) also alluded to Simpson’s sourcing.   

 

After a discussion of observations, and then analysis at “Ghost Note” (2021) and “Ice 8” (2018) the guests dispersed with museum stools, notebooks and pencil cases in hand. There would be fifteen minutes to fill their pages with magical realism before they’d reassemble in the Watson library for the outro. One visitor, wearing a wiry green hair ribbon and a plaid bandeau over an oversized button down, needled for more time which Ms. Akinmowo obliged. 

 

If there was one thing the field-trippers agreed on, it was the depth of Simpson’s work and reflection of their own experiences. When it was time to choose a muse, a clump of writers positioned their stools to face “Night Fall” (2023) a 12-foot painting in which a black woman with a fluffy roller set sits watching you from the top of a waterfall. She appears to lean on one shoulder while the rest of her body rushes down like a river through a canyon. Her expression is calm (maybe even judgmental) but her presence is thunderous. You can hear her body of water crashing on the rocks below. There wasn’t enough time in the closing for the writers to read their ekphrastic drafts, but a few cheery volunteers shared summaries. After spending the morning steeped in magical realism, they doubled back through the lobby, which was airy and chasmal. Having the museum and Ms. Simpson’s work all to themselves had been its own kind of Black girl magic.             

 

blacklove 🖤 and starlight 🌟 

 

“Lorna Simpson: Source Notes” will run through November 2nd, 2025 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Admission for New York residents is pay-what-you-wish.