Outline

Lorna Simpson first became known in the 1980s for work that confronted race, gender, and history. Employing the African American woman as a visual point of departure, she combined large-scale, multi-panel photographs with affixed text in order to put text and image into a poetic confrontation. In Outline, the photographs—a woman with no face, an isolated rope of braided hair—make reference to anthropological studies of Africans whose subjects were stereotypically portrayed in terms of isolated physical features. Simpson provides a voice in the form of text fragments, which join to form new words—"backlash" and "back pay," for example—that evoke historic and contemporary forms of exploitation.