Counting

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In her work, Lorna Simpson repeatedly uses a similar group of images that have both literal and symbolic associations: a braid represents racial difference; an old South Carolina smokehouse is a former slave quarters; human forms are faceless and therefore silent. In Counting, the first print Simpson ever produced, these elements are stacked like a totem pole. The numbers she includes—a list of work shifts, an equation between bricks and years of slavery, numbers of braids—may seem unrelated: as careless as the phrase “Who’s counting?” But Simpson’s work may be just that—an attempt to account for, and make sense of racial difference and inequality over countless years.

Keywords

Text in art
Printmaking
Hair
Photography
Post Modern
African American