1991

Counting

American, born 1960

Lorna Simpson embraced photogravure’s superb capacity for saturated tones of black, gray, and white. She paired her seemingly straightforward subjects—a woman, a brick structure, and braids—with phrases that relay obscure information such as hourly shifts, “310 years ago,” “1575 bricks,” and “70 braids.” Alongside the images, the texts evoke the long history of African American slavery and its manual labor, repetitive actions, and gendered work. They do not obviously correspond to what is visible in the pictures and thus seem to offer a contrasting or even dissenting account of what we are looking at.