Lorna Simpson on archives, image-making, and the artists who shaped her
What does an artist carry into the studio besides materials and memory? In a new podcast episode released April 8, 2026, American artist Lorna Simpson (b. 1960) traces the influences that have shaped her practice, from literature and film to the work of other artists. The conversation, hosted by Ben Luke and produced by David Clack and Aimee Dawson, centers on Simpson’s long-standing interest in photography, representation, and the unstable space between what is seen and what is understood.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Simpson has built a career around conceptual image-making that resists easy reading. In the episode, she reflects on her early photo-text works and her more recent paintings that incorporate found images, returning to questions of archive, history, and the visual language through which identity is framed. Her work has often moved between documentary reference and deliberate ambiguity, and the podcast follows that tension closely.
Simpson also speaks about the artists and thinkers who have informed her approach. She recalls the importance of David Hammons, and describes how an exhibition of Francisco de Zurbarán at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York influenced her thinking about images. She also discusses connections to Isaac Julien, Terry Adkins, and Wangechi Mutu, as well as the writing of Robin Coste Lewis and Audre Lorde. The films of Chantal Akerman, she says, remain vital to her practice.
That range is telling. Simpson’s work has long been attentive to the ways images are made, circulated, and interpreted, and the episode suggests that her practice is sustained as much by reading and viewing as by studio labor. She also speaks about testing herself through her work, and about the balance she seeks between refusal and engagement — a balance that gives viewers room to enter the work without flattening its complexity.
The episode arrives alongside Simpson’s presentation at Punta della Dogana in Venice, on view until November 22. It is also part of a broader podcast series that treats artists not as isolated figures, but as readers, viewers, and listeners shaped by a dense cultural field. In Simpson’s case, that field is especially clear: photography, painting, archive, literature, and film all remain in active conversation.
