Annual Henri Zerner Lecture: Artist Talk with Lorna Simpson [CANCELED]

Due to unforeseen circumstances, this event has been canceled. Check our calendar to join us for another upcoming lecture program.

This program is sponsored by Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Harvard Art Museums and through the generosity of alumni and friends in establishing the Henri Zerner Lecture Fund.

When Lorna Simpson finished her graduate studies at the University of California, San Diego, in 1985, she was already considered a pioneer of conceptual photography. Seeking to re-examine and re-define photographic practice for contemporary relevance, Simpson engaged the conceptual vocabulary of the time by creating exquisitely crafted documents that are as clean and spare as the closed, cyclic systems of meaning they produce. Her initial body of work helped significantly shift the view of the medium’s transience and malleability.

Simpson became well known in the mid-1980s for her large-scale photograph-and-text works that challenge conventional views of gender, identity, culture, history, and memory. In the mid-1990s, she began creating large multipanel photographs printed on felt that depict the sites of public sexual encounters. Over time, she turned to film and video works in which individuals engage in enigmatic conversations that seem to address the mysteries of both identity and desire. Throughout her body of work, Simpson questions memory and representation, whether in her moving juxtaposition of text and image, in her haunting video projection Cloudscape and its echo in the felt work Cloud, or in her large-scale video installation Momentum, which re-creates a childhood dance performance.

Her works have been exhibited at and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Haus der Kunst, Munich, among others. In Fall 2019, Simpson will receive the J. Paul Getty Medal, which honors individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to the practice, understanding, and support of the arts.

The lecture will take place in Menschel Hall, Lower Level. Please enter the museums via the entrance on Broadway. Doors will open at 5:30pm.

Free admission, but seating is limited. Tickets will be distributed beginning at 5:30pm at the Broadway entrance. One ticket per person.

Complimentary parking available in the Broadway Garage, 7 Felton Street, Cambridge.

In addition, modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.