In April 1965, Harper’s Bazaar unveiled an edition of the magazine guest-edited by photographer Richard Avedon and dedicated to “the off-beat side of Now.” Borne of a moment of upheaval not unlike the one we’re currently living in, the issue explored the people and ideas that were shaping the era. Sixty years later, we’re marking its anniversary by talking to some of our own era’s most influential figures and faces about the idea of the Now.
I ’m in Los Angeles right now. My daughter lives in L.A., and I have a home here. It was quite intense to fly into the city on a bright, sunny day and think about all the people who were displaced and the devastation that people are still dealing with from the fires. I know of so many people who have lost their homes and their places of business, artists who have lost their studios and their work.
I’d just left L.A. when the fires started. I was back in New York when I saw that the neighborhood next to ours in L.A. was under an evacuation order. To watch from a distance was terrifying. I was still on West Coast time, so I called everyone I knew in L.A. at 5:00 a.m., and they were all grabbing their things and leaving.
I was on the phone with my daughter. I woke her. She was calm, but she could smell the smoke. Fortunately, she has a great group of people around her in L.A. who know the city like the back of their hands, so she was safe, which was comforting.
There is so much going on in the world right now that I think it’s impossible to keep things at bay. Sometimes it’s important to just let yourself unravel and feel completely unmoored by what’s going on. I can’t always privilege productivity over sanity.
I do take solace in being able to make art. But I can’t say that I am so disciplined or have an exact formula for what to do when things seem out of control. I kind of just take it all in and let it all come out however it comes out. I don’t try to guard myself from life for the sake of anything else.
I think it’s crucial to hold on to a sense of who you are and what is important to you. But I’m not someone who can tough it through things any longer.
This new body of work I’ve been making, “Personas in Silver,” grew out of some paintings I was making of asteroids and bullet holes for a show at my gallery, Hauser & Wirth, late last fall. I went through these different iterations of the work for that show, trying to figure out how to approach it and what kind of palette to use, and arrived at these sort of gray, silvery tones.
I’ve made paintings like this before, but the previous iterations were either in deep hues of blue or these intense or monochromatic colors. So I decided to experiment by creating these portraits using this new palette and a mix of headshots from advertisements in the magazines Ebony and Jet in the 1960s and 1970s. Even when it seems like these new portraits are of a single face, most of them draw on two or three different faces.
There is a kind of drama to the photography used in the advertising imagery from that period. It’s something I’ve come back to over and over again in my practice. Up until the 1980s, those magazines really served as a kind of cultural and historical document. They offered a window on American life—and African life, both in America and globally—that was very different from what you saw in other magazines.
I remember going to my grandmother’s house when I was younger and paging through them. There is a space that exists around the activity of holding a magazine or a book or a printed journal in your hands and focusing your attention on it as you move through it in its own chronology that I still find valuable.
There is an exhibition of my paintings [“Lorna Simpson: Source Notes”] opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in May. I’ve only really been painting as a substantial part of my practice for the past 10 or 12 years, but I did study it. I went to the School of Visual Arts in New York, and you have to take painting and drawing as part of your foundation classes. I was just much more captivated back then by photography.
If I’m going to be honest, I would also look at some of my friends who were painters, and they were so much better! I would walk into their studios and be like, “You did that?” I was just like, “Oh my God. I’m so bad at this.”
So when I returned to painting years later, I did so by starting small, just doing drawings and collages and smaller work. I really just kind of hid out and experimented, without the expectation that it would turn into anything.
Unease and uncertainty are important for me because they kind of allow me to not be consumed with ideas of good or bad or success or failure. I just have to do what I do and see where it leads. I’ve worked out for most of my life, but I was also shocked by how physically demanding it is to make a painting. It’s exhausting!
Painting requires a kind of intuitive response of me that is very different from photography and really forces me to be in a moment. Of course, I have ideas of what I want a painting to be, and conceptually there are things that I’m after, but in the actual act of painting I have to kind of let go.
When I was 18 or 19 years old, I was an intern in the education department at the Studio Museum in Harlem. David Hammons was an artist in residence there at the time. To see artists like him and Charles Abramson and Candace Hill-Montgomery work … They would just make what they wanted to make without thinking about where it was going to go or be seen. They would make it in their studios, on the street, as an installation; they just made the work.
I think maybe because of that, I didn’t really attach any real concept of financial success to what I was making or to what it meant for me to be an artist. I remember just thinking, “Well, if I can get a job doing something like answering the phones at the Sandoz corporation as a receptionist, then I can do art.”
That’s why so many of the opportunities I’ve had have come as such a surprise to me. It’s still a surprise to me that I get to explore different ways of working and make things that are meaningful to me. It’s nerve-wracking and suspenseful, and there are no guarantees. But it’s always a surprise and the process is the gift.
