The serial, often performative work of the 1970s and early ’80s is an obvious anchor. There is a long history of feminist collage. In a moment when even the immediate future seems so obstinately obscure, many artists have returned to the radical material possibilities of collage as a way of contemplating the complexity of these converging issues, utilizing the malleability of the medium to envision feminist futures. The most powerful feminist visions embrace the ideals of “ feminism for the 99%,” a philosophy put forward by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser in their 2019 book of the same name, which repositions the challenges and threats to “womxn” in relation to representation, class division, and environmental devastation. In an era defined by acute threats-different, more dispersed, but no less urgent than those preceding the world wars that shaped much modernist collage-feminism today seeks new models for living as a way of moving forward. Facsimile edition published by Hatje Cantz, 2004Īs Simpson’s work reminds us, collage has been central to explorations of feminism, as it has been to many ideologies of resistance. The great potential of collage is to reveal culture itself as a vulnerable thread of associative ideas, woven together through our assumptions and expectations, and grounded by institutions, law, language-and images that are easily rearranged, so that their meanings shift. But its mechanisms are deceptively simple: as a visual and literary strategy, it has the capacity to project complex and even contradictory messages, gleaning much from the businesses of propaganda and advertising with which it often intertwines. Like speculative fiction, collage relies on fragments of experience as a way of teasing out the fantastical. Making poetry out of collisions has long been the purview of collage: to forge from familiar elements something strange, to hide and reveal, deconstruct and reconstruct, eradicate and conjure. Star Glow Linda Linda Linda Afrialon Kool-N-Light Lioness Simpson’s artist statement, as Delphic as the works, gathers some of the original ad copy that accompanied the women in the pictures. They speak of a once-imagined future and of a present moment grappling with the limits and possibilities of optimism. Simpson’s images, neither pedantic nor prescriptive, reference the progressive confidence of the magazines, the illusions of glamour and desire they project, and the fraught history of Black women’s hair (a frequent subject for Simpson across her career). magazines, begun at midcentury, that focus on Black news, culture, and entertainment. Simpson propels forward through the past, splicing her subjects out of advertisements from vintage copies of Ebony and Jet, groundbreaking U.S. What future might they portend? Lorna Simpson, Earth & Sky #50, 2018. Galactic, regal, and elemental by turn, Simpson’s subjects appear out of time, their serene expressions foils for exuberant coifs, expansive imaginations, even glints of premonition. In other images from the series, uncut geological specimens-of asphalt and amber, garnet and malachite-adorn women as magnificent crowns and gowns in one, a perfect bubble floats, inviolable, above a young, modish face. The subject looks straight out of the frame, one hand poised as if about to relay an important message from the stars. In Lorna Simpson’s Earth & Sky #50 (2018), part of a series of collaged portraits of Black women that Simpson has been making for a decade, a constellation glides in streaks and waves from a woman’s head.
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