Black Women’s Recovery in the Visual Dimension: Exploring Lorna Simpson’s Ebony Collages
Lorna Simpson’s collection, Ebony Collages, 2010 — present, enact the visual “recovery work” Jennifer C. Nash speaks to in her chapter “Archives of Pain.” Providing an aesthetic space where Black women can resolve the violent objectification of their flesh through self-representation (Nash, 30), Simpson’s collages recover the bodily subjectivity of Black womanhood through her creative imagination of Black hair. By way of ink and clipped paper, Lorna Simpson recovers her sisters from Patricia Hill Collins’ notion of the “controlling image (Nash 33)” and “fleshy excess,” by resisting stereotypical representations of Black female hair (hooks 70). Using images from Ebony Magazine, a canonical photographic display of the Black American elite, Simpson denies racial capitalism its ability to depict the hair of Black women as an excess of corporeal flesh. Instead, her series reconstitutes these women as Black female bodies, whose subjectivity is embodied through their reclamation of their hair and selves. Simpson’s Ebony Collages are a capacious self-representation of Black femininity, subjectivity, and ultimately visual embodiment — as one gazes upon Simpson’s work, she offers the possibility of recovering oneself and reconciling one’s connection to other women through the cultural experience and memory of haircare.
This essay will outline the ways in which the commodification of Black female bodies in the visual dimension has reduced Black women to a state of “fleshy excess,” and how Black women’s hair have become a central site where visual representational violence and de-subjectification has been waged. Next, I will explore Simpson’s collection entitled Ebony Collages, and the ways in which her work deliberately chooses not to refute the notion of Black female excess, but rather become wholly comfortable with it. Finally, this essay will conclude with a discussion of the ways in which Lorna Simpson creates a visual space for Black women to recover themselves, embody their excess, and reconcile their relationships with one another. The material and spiritual embodiment of Black women’s hair has come to be a major signifying element in Black feminist thought, and Simpson’s series of collages is yet another manifestation in visual culture where Black women artists engage in the struggle of destabilizing “controlling images (Nash 33)”, and recover their own identities through creative self-representation.
According to bell hooks, “commodities produce bodies (71),” and the onset of racial capitalism has resulted in the widespread commodification of Black female flesh in the visual dimension. As such, beauty is no longer viewed as a “sustained category of precapitalist culture (hooks 71),” but rather as something that can be bought or made through the acquisition of capital. These postmodern notions have catalyzed a reconceptualization of Black female beauty within the popular cultural imagination as something antithetical to nature; it is not “innate” but rather “constructed” (hooks 72). Denying Black women and femmes’ access to the concept of beauty, it is only through an examination of Hortense Spiller’s notion of “excess” that we can come to understand how the Black feminine flesh has become imagined “as too much,” since the incidence of African chattel slavery in the Americas (Spillers).
Spillers argues that when the Black body is brought to America, it becomes de-subjectified into “flesh,” a physical body devoid of any personhood or meaning. In this regard, Black women came to signify “property plus,” and were, “made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order (65).” Under these cultural conditions, the misguided notion that Black women must don something outside of themselves to become beautiful flourished, and this has led to the development and frequent deployment of representations of Black female flesh in stereotypical manners (hooks 72). Mary Helen Washington reminds us that even Black women themselves remain vulnerable to these colonizing images of Black female visual embodiment, and that the work of Black female cultural producers of any kind is to insist upon their own name, space and place — but this does not always occur (Washington). Despite being a Black business, the imagery on display in Ebony Magazine has across time, given vitality to mainstream representations of the Black woman’s body. In fact, the magazine is modeled after a white colonial aesthetic, Life Magazine, and depicts the conscious effort of Black cultural producers to portray Black individuals positively, respectably, and self-affirmingly (75 Years of Ebony Magazine). Despite this conscious effort, the magazine’s complicit acceptance of Western beauty ideals is best evidenced in the stylization of Black women’s hair — the subject of manipulation in Lorna Simpson’s Ebony Collages.
The postmodern notion that Black female’s lack an inherent claim to beauty is often deployed, and performed through hair. Across Ebony Magazine’s decades long career, Black women featured in the publication have adorned their hair in both Afrocentric looks, and in styles more suitable to Western notions of beauty: such as pressed hair and blonde wigs (75 Years of Ebony Magazine). According to bell hooks: “Black hair, and not the butt, has come to represent animalistic sexuality (70),” a hallmark feature of the Black woman’s controlling image. The versatility of Black female hair is worth praising, however the commodification of Black feminine hairstyles evidenced in Ebony Magazine lends further credence to the conceptualization of Black women’s embodiment as a state of “fleshy excess.” Lorna Simpson’s collages pay careful attention to this exotic othering of Black women’s bodies, specifically hair, and destabilizes this viewpoint by denying her viewer the opportunity to read, or see, racial and sexual stereotypes onto the subjects of her work. By relegating the hair of her Black female subjects to a realm of aesthetic imagination, Simpson’s intentional choice about how to represent hair transgresses stereotypical visual productions of Black women’s flesh. The Ebony Collages allow Black hair to be many different things; Simpson does not seek to bind Black female embodiment to any particular style of formation — it is liberated to be imagined outside of the context of the “controlling image (Nash 33).” Beauty is excess, and it needn’t be defined by a specific image, style or aesthetic.
Because Simpson allows her subject and her hair to be so capacious, the Ebony Collages do not refute the notion of Black female excess, but rather they are wholly comfortable with it. In Off Black (2012), Simpson’s embrace of excess is evident in her depiction of a woman’s curl pattern. Resembling the mythological femme fatale figure that is Medusa, the woman’s hair is not depicted as orderly, rather, it is an active participant in both the art and image. Resembling the apparent motion of snakes, the female subject at the center of Off Black’s hair comes alive. Simpson’s use of color also functions to move her viewer away from the “controlling image” on another front. A cascading arrangement of blue and indigo ink on paper, in the same way that Barry Jenkins reminds us in his film Moonlight (2016) that Black boys look blue under the cover of moonlight, Simpson’s deliberate choice in color calls on her viewer to imagine what a Black women’s hair might look like at dusk, beneath the light of the moon. Might her curls also appear blueish in hue? And then again, who’s to say her hair does not always radiate in blue, or perhaps shades of red?
In Redhead (2011), Simpson allows her subject to embrace and embody her contradiction. In particular, she gives Black hair, and her subject permission to be antagonistically cooperative with her own self. Black bangs peer beneath a scarlet crown reminiscent of a rose — the subject of Simpson’s image is a redhead can’t you see? Simultaneously affirming the choice of Black women who experiment with their physical appearance by way of their personal choices about how to style and adorn their locks, Simpson also reminds her viewer that in regards to Black women’s representation, there is always more to the subject than what meets the eye. There are a multitude of ways to read, or rather view, Redhead (2011), and Simpson intends for us to embrace and relish in this realm of visual excess. Beset in the woman’s gaze juxtaposed with Simpson’s choice of color, the image seems to suggest a particular kind of sentiment: Have you ever known how it is to feel like the redheaded stepchild? Have you ever been two things at once — of your own body and another’s imagination of your flesh?
Alike their hair, Simpson creates an alternative “aesthetic dimension (Davis 163–164)” where Black women are not too much, but rather their self-representation testifies on behalf of the notion that we, as Black woman and femmes, have the capacity to feel and be so capacious. In Speechless (2017), Simpson fashions her subject’s hair as a cornucopia of letters seemingly cut from a newspaper or magazine. The subject’s beehive do spells out no familiar word, but the language of the image is one of ambiguity. Simpson injects meaning back into her representation of the Black female flesh — we need not make sense of her embodiment to appreciate her beauty. Hair can also be story or narrative in Simpson’s series. In Olivia Worked in Bethlehem Mines (2017), hair is bound to memory, and similarly in Love Knot (2017), hair bears the markings of a tenuous and complicated love relationship. Staring into the image, there is something sapphic about the bloom Simpson situates atop her subject’s head. As one looks deeper into Love Knot (2017), the hair Simpson constructs begins to resemble the bosom and bodies of other women. Here, within Simpson’s “aesthetic dimension (Davis 163–164)”, Black women can recover themselves and one another through the memory and experience of their hair.
In her work Tone (2012), Simpson deploys color differently, switching the object of emphasis from hair to the skin. The face of the woman cut from Ebony’s pages now illuminated, Simpson’s subject’s hair become greyed whisps of ambiguity. Through her deliberate work with color, Tone (2012) seems to suggest that perhaps it’s what’s in a woman’s head that is of more matter than the way she adorns the fibers that grow from it. A seminal piece in the Ebony Collages collection, in Tone (2012) Simpson fully transforms Black female “fleshy excess” into a Black womanly body, despite only working with images of women from the bust above. In many ways reminiscent of our own Milky Way galaxy, in Tone (2012), the female subject is at the center of all that is, and her subjectivity is one worth considering, engaging, and seeking fellowship with. Simpson has recovered the Black female flesh, and ushered the visual embodiment of the Black woman into her own space of imagination, possibility, and being. She fulfills Mary Helen Washington’s plea for Black female cultural producers to insist upon their own name, space, and representation in the aesthetic dimension (Washington). Across the Ebony Collage’s Simpson lays claim to Black female humanity — and she has imagined herself and her sisters completely outside of the “controlling image (Nash 33).”
An important theme in Black feminist thought writ large is women’s reconciliation with one another, and themselves (Washington). Simpson’s Ebony Collage’s carve out space in the visual dimension where Black women can recover their being and embodiment, and are offered the potential of becoming congruous with oneself. In many ways, this act of recovering the self, offers the opportunity for one to realize how much they are alike, and need other women. In Medium (2012), Simpson explores the possibility of hair as a site where women can return to themselves, and find one another. Using various shades of purple ink to fashion her subject’s hair, Simpson paints in such a way that her subjects hair come to resemble feminine silhouettes and womanly figures. As the female subject gazes upward toward her hair, a memory of kinship with other women is born. Alike Suge in The Color Purple, who adores the experience of Celie’s embrace and care as she tends to her hair — her hands feel familiar, and remind her of her foremothers.
“Dear God, Shug Avery sit up in bed a little today. I wash and comb out her hair. She got the nottiest, shortest, kinkiest hair I ever saw, and I loves every strand of it…I comb and pat, comb and pat. First she say, hurry up and git finish. Then she melt down a little and lean back gainst my knees. That feel just right, she say. That feel like mama used to do. Or maybe not mama. Maybe grandma (Walker 53).”
References
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https://lsimpsonstudio.com/collages/ebony-collages-2010-2011.
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