1990 was groundbreaking for the world of art, thanks to Lorna Simpson. That year, the artist—lauded for her work as a conceptual photographer—became both the first Black woman to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and one of the first to show at the Venice Biennale.

Simpson’s oeuvre has since grown, spanning collage, film, and sculpture. But regardless of the medium, her themes remain consistent: the nature of identity (including race and gender), representation, and their place in and impact on history and memory.

Her painting career launched a decade ago, with another celebrated debut at the Venice Biennale in 2015. In the years since, she’s continued to hold solo shows around the world, including two critically acclaimed exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth in New York: Darkening (2019), a mixed-media show with videos, painting, and collages using vintage photos from Ebony magazine; and Earth & Sky (2024), a show of paintings inspired by both a 1922 meteor shower that landed at the feet of a Black tenant farmer named Ed Bush (who was written out of the historical account), and an Ebony story about gun violence.

Now, Simpson is preparing for a new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that will, for the first time, present a survey of her paintings. Lorna Simpson: Source Notes, opening May 19, will feature 30 works spanning the past 10 years. “I cannot assume how I’m going to feel about the work,” she says about reviewing this period of her career. “I can see different avenues that I’ve run down, and I can see different works that I produced over that time that repeat and have threads. But I’m very curious to see what I make of that—stepping back and looking at it at this moment.”

Fellow artist and longtime friend Glenn Ligon has had a similar career trajectory. The conceptual artist first gained notoriety in the late ’80s for his text-based paintings, which used the words of James Baldwin and Richard Pryor, among other prominent Black artists. Like Simpson, his work explores themes of race and identity. And (also like Simpson) he has expanded across mediums over the course of his career, working with video and creating a series of instantly recognizable neons. On May 21st, an eponymous exhibition of these neon installations, as well as videos and paintings, will go on view at The Brant Foundation in New York.

Here, they contemplate the broad concept of beauty—intellectually, artistically, politically, and intimately.

Lorna Simpson: I thought of what beauty means to me, but it only came to me as lists, without a defense or a philosophical determination of what fits in the category and what doesn’t. The first thing that came to mind was actually visiting with you, with our 116th Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Glenn Ligon: Oh wow, yes.

LS: So much of that, and her intensity, to me, is about beauty and clarity in and around justice. To watch her look at art and how your work, and the other works that she has in her office on loan from the National Portrait Gallery, was another way of thinking about beauty and what information is taken in that makes what we see beautiful and restorative.

“Beauty isn’t docile…it can be vulnerable, but it is not this docile thing.”

GL: That was an amazing moment, when we were invited to her office for a reception to see her art collection, borrowed from museums in Washington. What was amazing about it was that she takes inspiration from art—lives with it in her office, sees art as a way we think about democracy. Not only did she have the work of Alma Thomas, and figurative, abstract work, [but there] was a doll someone made for her just after seeing the confirmation hearings and was inspired to make this talking doll for her.

She takes art seriously. It’s part of what forms her worldview. I remember she said she has a standing desk that looks out to the front steps of the courthouse (her office is in the Supreme Court building). And she said, ‘I like to stand there when I’m writing my opinions because I want to be connected to what people are saying or thinking.’ Because there are protests there every day. And I thought, she’s really connected to this idea that she serves the people.

LS: She’s not existing in this ivory tower that is separate.

GL: Right, and that the art serves her in reminding her of her duties as a citizen, as a justice, as somebody who’s upholding democracy.

LS: When she was last seen with her cowrie shell [necklace] on her justice robes, I was like, that’s some beauty!

GL: [Laughs] And a read too!

LS: Those are kind of all the components. Beauty isn’t docile…it can be vulnerable, but it is not this docile thing. In also thinking about that moment and about this time, what brings a smile to my face is thinking about my grandmother, who was born in 1914 and I got to know through my young adulthood.
Knowing her political beliefs and her tenacious way of talking about politics in New Orleans (where she was born), and also in Chicago—what would she make of this moment? That this is nothing new. That would be said. But it would be first expressed through a facial expression of like, and you think…? And you’re surprised by this moment? That is a thing of beauty, this kind of continuity that I find solace in, of thinking about who is in control of the course of history. Or the way that the past is reframed and challenged or diminished or erased. Memory has a lot to do with beauty for me as well.

GL: Talking about memory reminds me of something in a Baldwin essay in the ’50s. I’m not going to get the line exactly, but he says, ‘Hanging out with my buddies in those wine and urine-stained hallways, I thought to myself, what will happen to all this beauty?’ We are very beautiful as Black people. But many Black people don’t know it. I think the world is different now. Black people know we’re beautiful now, but in part, that beauty was a struggle. It was a political struggle. ‘Black is Beautiful’ as a slogan was political. It wasn’t just like, ‘Oh, we cute.’ It was a social personhood against negativity, against degradation, against assaults on Black beauty. We are in a moment when that’s coming again, and it’s coming in the form of anti-DEI. Like, ‘Oh, that’s a DEI hire, that’s why the plane crashed.’

LS: Scapegoating.

GL: A kind of assault on Black humanity. Beauty, as I said and as Baldwin said, is political. The assertion of beauty becomes a way to fight.

LS: Which also brings to my mind, as another memory, a friend of mine standing while we were all mourning and going to funerals during the ’90s because of AIDS. A friend of hers (who I did not know) was also dying. In the last week of his life, he said, ‘My eyes were only built for beauty’—which always stayed with me as this declaration about choosing an interior source for beauty. What your expression and your part in that expression is and is not touchable in that way. Whenever I’m asked something about beauty, that phrase goes through my head as a way of ownership. Who gets to own beauty? So often in the culture that
we live in, beauty is this kind of sectioned-off area that everyone doesn’t get. Only a select few get to operate within the confines of the meaning of beauty; it’s explicitly only in certain areas and certain things. I kind of like the eye as the source, the viewer as a determiner of what is beautiful and what isn’t.

GL: Remember Jet Magazine, the centerfold ‘Beauty of the Week’? These images of beautiful Black women as centerfolds in the magazine. I know that Ebony and Jet had been a big source material for the earlier work you were doing around portraiture.

LS: There was also ‘Picture of the Week.’ And ‘Picture of the Week’ was actually more interesting than ‘Beauty of the Week,’ because it kind of also focused on contradictions in both the image and what the image was about. ‘Picture of the Week’ could have been a drag show at some club in Harlem, and the contradiction was that there was a political figure there or someone else who was standing by and engaged in this themselves. Particularly with the conformity of those ideals around beauty in Jet and in Ebony. But there was always this attention to what confounded those particular belief systems as well. At the same time, the horror—‘Picture of the Week’ could also have been a murder and the documentation of that. In some ways, in terms of American history, the thing of beauty is also the thing about some location of truth in something that is horrible. It’s like when Black people say the phrase, ‘But you know what? The beauty of it is…’

GL: Yes!

LS: Shifting it around into, ‘Well, the beauty of it is that in contradiction to all of that, X happened.’ This form of optimism and the use of the word ‘beauty.’ Either justice is delayed or not present, but the beauty of it is something else shows up and corrects it. These are the only ways that I can get into this subject. Because it’s so much through language and those moments where the word ‘beauty’ itself is used as a tool, or used to take up space in
some way.

Another phrase was ‘Found safe and sound.’

GL: What does that mean?

LS: In terms of people who are missing, or being looked for, or were last seen in a dangerous situation. More rarely now do you find the words ‘found safe and sound,’ and the relief—beauty as this thing of relief. For me, beauty is this thing that is in all these nooks and crannies of how we live and how we give ourselves permission to enact on, or to feel certain in things. Beauty isn’t only optical, but a psychological relief.

Maybe all of what I am saying is colored by the fact that it’s February in 2025 which feels like we’ve already gone through two years of 2025. But then I think of the ways in which we invite or think about beauty differently, that will be the resilience.

GL: Well, even just celebrating. It’s Black History Month in the United States. That celebration of beauty, of Black possibility, of Black history. Walking around New York the other day on the subway, there were these little flashes on screens for Black History Month. There’s Rosa Parks, there is Malcolm X, and they’re always good pictures—not Rosa Park looking beat down, Rosa Park looking fly. I guess we take solace in beauty too. There’s strength in beauty. It operates in many different ways.

LS: That can’t be erased.

“Whenever I’m asked something about beauty, that phrase goes through my head as a way of ownership. Who gets to own beauty? So often in the culture that we live in, beauty is this kind of sectioned-off area that everyone doesn’t get.”

GL: But you make very beautiful paintings, Lorna! I always say, when people ask me the question of beauty in my work, that I feel like it is a hook. It’s a way to draw people in. You were saying beauty is attached to questions of language. It’s funny to think about it in terms of my work because my work is primarily language. Beauty becomes the way to get people engaged with these dense, text-heavy paintings.

LS: [It reminds me of your painting] I saw recently. I think it was at San Francisco Art Museum in a group exhibition, and they had a coal dust painting that was completely black, which I don’t see very often—

GL: I don’t even know which one that is. Digging in the crates! [It had] this kind of glistening, like looking at a night sky (which I also love and think of as beauty). The glistening of that painting—very dense, but there are these points of light that emanate from the fractal surfaces of the small pieces of coal that were quite incredible. You invite in this kind of optical experience, like the painting you had at Hauser & Wirth, that was, I want to say, 60-feet long.

GL: Oh, my big ass painting [laughs].

LS: The big ass painting! I find in this abstraction of texture and the optical impression of letters and words and sentences that kind
of diminish and fall apart. But in this beautiful way the work reveals and conceals, reveals and conceals.

GL: I don’t know if I’ve ever really thought about those paintings this way. But that painting uses “Stranger in the Village,” a Baldwin essay from the ’50s. So much of that essay is built around how these white Swiss villagers in the town where he’s living respond to his Blackness. We were talking earlier about Baldwin saying, ‘What will become of all this beauty?’ Well, Baldwin never thought of himself as beautiful when he was younger. He had to learn to realize he was beautiful. In some ways, the paintings kind of restage all of that, in terms of the allure of the material. The coal dust on the surface is a waste material that’s brought into the space of art, and that’s what makes the paintings beautiful. This idea that things that are presumably, or conceived of as marginal or outside, suddenly become central and beautiful. That certainly mirrors the trajectory in Baldwin’s own thinking about beauty, but also his centrality in the culture now, Baldwin being a seminal figure for so many people, many years after his death.

LS: But in a way, it is also a bit heartbreaking, that journey of self-discovery, of self-love. The personal side to me, and with other Black figures from that period of time (or even to the ’70s), that personal, interior embrace of who they are—that lonely journey—is what gives me pause about Baldwin.
Just in terms of feeling empathy for that, and the weight of what must have been.

GL: He was friends with Nina Simone. He was friends with Maya Angelou. But in some ways, I think you’re absolutely right. His journey was individual. He had to discover the beauty in himself. And in some ways he had to leave the United States to find it, because it was too hard in the cultural climate that he grew up in to discover himself.

LS: To fully enact that.

GL: Exactly.

Photography by Valerie Chiang. Photo Assistant Kaylee Smith.