Multiply exposed: black ungendered maternity in Lorna Simpson’s 1957–2009 Interior

Abstract

Abstract

“Multiply Exposed” follows two black figures who emerge twice in Lorna Simpson's work, in the photography series 1957–2009 Interior (2009) and in the video installation Chess (2013). In Interior, Simpson replicates the dress, pose, and setting of a young black couple captured in 1957. Years later, in Chess, Simpson re-re-enacts these characters, aging and multiplying them. The article attends to this genealogy and takes up Interior as the end of her “Bye, Bye Black Girl Era,” the seeming disappearance of the black female figure in her work. It suggests revisiting a concurrent era: Simpson's exploration with felt, beginning with her homage to James Van Der Zee in 9 Props (1995). Looking at Van Der Zee's legacy illustrates the ordinary innovations of props and superimposition also present in Simpson's art. Superimposition, the layering and combining of images to produce a multiply exposed effect, becomes a metaphor to describe the expressive quality of Simpson's reproductive relationality. By attending to their gestural, sartorial, and material elements, the article theorizes Simpson's reproductive roleplay as black ungendered maternity, a history of embodied fracture and kinship that is conceptually matrilineal. Black ungendered maternity illustrates how black artists mobilize unique modes of togetherness for strategic visibility.