Lorna's Blues: Artful Instruction, and the imaginations of Black Women

by Imani Perry

Blues is my life. It's a true feeling that comes from the heart, not something that just comes out of my mouth. Blues is what I love, and blues is what I always do.
—Koko Taylor, Queen of the Blues

Those funded experiences, colored in a dark shade of blue… enable us to invade the future with a bit more than luck.
—Eddie S. Glaude Jr., In a Shade of Blue

An astronomical term is one of the tightest rivets in the field of African American Studies: the Nadir. In Rayford W. Logan's 1954 book, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901, Logan used the term to refer to the post-Reconstruction era in which the legal architecture of Jim Crow was stitched together with horrific violence to deny Black people the promises of freedom and full citizenship. For us scholars in the field, “the Nadir” is a conceptual given. It rolls off the tongue. There are no debates over its accuracy, only over its length and resiliency.

Michele Mitchell describes the substance of the metaphor as follows in Keywords for African American Studies (2018): ““Nadir” can be…an astronomical term that describes either “a point on the celestial sphere diametrically opposite some other point”… Yet “nadir” is perhaps most frequently used as an antonym for the more general sense of “zenith,” or “high point.” Put another way, “nadir” indicates the lowest point possible for a person or collective…”¹ The concept echoes through Black life. A nadir seems always to be looming just possibly around the corner or present even when unseen. It is the threat of backlash that underpins the blues song of American history for Black people, a steady ache in the progress of history with its motifs of neglect and attention that turn brutal.

Zenith is the opposite of Nadir.
Zenith sounds like a Black woman's name.
Zenith is the title of one of Lorna Simpson's 13-foot-woman-centered figurative paintings.

Zenith (2021), originally presented in her 2021 exhibition Everrrything at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, is one of the pieces in what I have come to think of as “Lorna's Blues.” An indigo blue-toned masked Black woman rises in the center. At that height, she overwhelms in the most intoxicating way. She is a spectral bricolage, wearing a peplumed blazer that could be from the 1940s or ´80s, or perhaps it is a bustle. Her straightened mid-length hair with a pompadour fashioned in the middle could be worn today or 50 years ago. Sparkle, stars, and blue-tinted lines emanate off of her legless form. But footprints (hers, ours?) lead us up to her magisterial image.

Simpson asks: What if the Zenith is a Black woman? I take this to be more than the quip “I saw God, she's Black,” a delightful jab at patriarchy and white supremacy. This is, to my mind, a deeper provocation because it is a query. What would her/our Zenith be, in contrast to the Nadir?

The painting is footed with stacks of sedimentary rock, broadly termed bluestone, which derives its color from minerals in the rock. In the United States it is found in New York, Pennsylvania, and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, incidentally (perhaps) meaningful because of the roles these places had in framing and naming the nation: commerce, constitution, and slavocracy. Simpson's bluestone comes from an upstate New York quarry where historic bluestone from various places is gathered. The material is common in domestic buildings. In meticulously designed homes, the slabs are cut and placed precisely; in Simpson's work, they are as well but the rough beauty is left intact, reminding us that they come from nature and are part of a long past.

Bluestone is a term that also exists in African American folk ritual and spiritual practices. In Hoodoo it refers to blue copperas, which is a powerful but toxic tool. Put in protective mojo bags mixed with other materials like nail clippings and chicken feet, and wrapped in red felt, it aids practitioners in bending a harsh world in their favor. In other words, blue has been used to manage living in the nadir, and the blues simultaneously put hoodoo to music, with references to mojo bags and being “fixed” by spells.

In African American studies, the visuality of the term “the Nadir” has been inadequately explored. As we learn from Sarah Lewis's work in both Vision & Justice (2016) and The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (2024), the construction of race as well as the argument for racial justice cannot be fully understood nor pursued without engaging the visual terrain. And yet compared to literature and music, it remains relatively undertheorized despite the fact that our most critical thinkers understood its significance and virtually all used sight and scene to explain our condition, from the ocular “loophole of retreat” of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to the scenic chiasmus of Frederick Douglass's narrative wherein he battled the slave breaker Edward Covey and was transformed from slave to “a man.” Perhaps we don't talk about what the Nadir has to do with seeing because the conceptual significance of the visual eludes so many of us.

This is really what brings me to the powerfully instructive work of Lorna Simpson. As I embarked on writing my next book Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, I realized how much visual artists had not only inspired but shaped my thinking. One of Simpson's pieces, Seven Mouths (1993), provided the cover to my second book More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2014) and she has long been known as one of the most important American conceptual artists. She has had a series of “firsts” and distinctions in the art world through the repeated seasons of racial backlash (perhaps “blacklash” would be a better term for the specific American cultural turns to punish Black people that recur whenever things get a bit better) and has confronted them head on with provocative brilliance.

In 2019, there was a new flurry of attention to her work focusing on her use of the color blue as well as her turn to painting and screenprinting alongside her usual use of photography and collage. Writing for the New Yorker, Doreen St. Félix described Simpson's paintings for her 2019 exhibition, Darkening, at Hauser & Wirth New York as “monumental panels that drown the viewer in blues—some shades so potent that they are black, purple. Using graduated saturations of ink-wash over gesso, Simpson builds landscapes and seascapes that recall J. M. W. Turner or Chinese shan shui compositions.”

I talked to Simpson about her Blues over Zoom and then, in one of the endless frustrations of technology for a Gen Xer, the recording disappeared. Or maybe (more likely) I failed to use the technology appropriately. But it also might have been a bit of kismet. I had to remember rather than simply record and repeat. I remember her detailing the processes of screenprinting and inking, gesso and wood. I remember the way she talked about allowing her imagination to guide her, to continually experiment even from the perch of already recognized greatness. I remembered a story she told me about how she is continuing this work using astronomy textbooks and discovering what Toni Morrison described as the “Africanist presence”² within American letters, the way Black people are ever-present in American texts, from the beginning, often distorted but always already witnessing. Lorna's Blues instruct us to both do and see, to see what we're doing, to do what we see, in the aspirational sense.

Simpson's foray into the blues has provided me with something much greater than artwork to be read or analyzed. The pieces provide an intellectual instruction. Encouraged by the enthusiasm she has for pushing beyond the boundaries, I approach the work as that which demands an interlocutor, not just a viewer.

In Observer (2021), another of the large-scale paintings, the figure is wearing a blue robe and a one-eyed veil with stars wrapping around her form like jewels or a fog-like nebula. Striped red paint drips over the panel like blood. Simpson's Americana, her red, white, and blue‐and Black‐is so reconstructed that it is authorial as opposed to referential. I mean, this isn't just a commentary on the failures or limitations of the American project. She's calling it as she sees it. Indeed, the figure wears a veil that covers one eye, but she doesn't look shrouded, so much as she appears as a wise watcher, testifying. Here, the DuBoisian “veil” of race is implied. It is a vexing metaphor, one we sometimes pretend to use handily, but the way it confounds is in fact an attestation to what a veil does and what race does. It depends on both seeing and misunderstanding, to appear and to be disappeared, a border between one world and another that is diaphanous and resilient. DuBois refers to the second sight that experiencing Blackness offers African Americans, but it also marks a “second site”: a relation in the Republic of being subjected, objectified, and knowledgeable all at once.

Simpson's physical as well as intellectual labor is apparent in the painting. We can see that physical effort was required to make this grand form. Remember Harriet Jacobs's gimlet from her classic slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl? The little metal object she used to bore a hole in the wall of her garrett—her cramped, disabling, vermin-filled hiding place, the subterfuge that allowed her freedom from enslavement? That tool gave her the loophole of retreat, that aperture through which she could see the world on her own terms. The gimlet was not a metaphor, it was a tool.

Jacobs wrote:
One day I hit my head against something, and found it was a gimlet…. I groped around; and having found the side next the street, where I could frequently see my children, I stuck the gimlet in and waited for evening. I bored three rows of holes, one above another; then I bored out the interstices between. I thus succeeded in making one hole about an inch long and an inch broad. I sat by it till late into the night, to enjoy the little whiff of air that floated in. In the morning I watched for my children.

Jacobs's observation was not a passive act. That the loophole allowed her to see without being seen was important. Simpson's Observer also required labor to create and the physicality of the endeavor adds to its meaning. But she is not only seen, she is huge: a defiance to history's obfuscations.

In a third large figurative piece titled All Night (2021), there is only one place where the blue is shown: the bluestone at the figure's feet. The rest appears as shades of Black and gray, but of course the darkest night also suggests blue. Pared down in color, I focus on the constellations. I linger on Andromeda. In Greek mythology, the beautiful Ethiopian daughter of King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopeia was held captive. It was how she saved her people. When Poseidon sent a sea monster to destroy their Kingdom, she sacrificed her life, chained to a rock, but was ultimately rescued by Perseus. It is a romance.

Hmm. Andromeda is bound. But Polaris, or what we call the North Star, the “Pole star,” is potentially freeing. It is the brightest star in the night sky thus making it useful for navigation. Constellations were especially useful for unlettered people. They were stable in a terrorizing condition, and by that I mean the horror of unfreedom combined with the ever-present threat of unexpected trauma. Later still, in the Nadir, they continued to use the sky to see. Herein we might see the celestially informed freedom dreaming that persisted as a “zenith-informed” practice. We can say Blackness in the Americas began not only in abjection but in an imaginative futurism that was sustained through waves of disappointment. (Cue Earth Wind and Fire's song “Keep Your Head to the Sky.”)

Simpson attests to this by making constellations of Black women. They tell stories and history. They also reorder knowledge, attesting to the value of both study and creation. Most of all, to my mind, is that they guide us through the bitter and sweetness of the blues.

Imani Perry is the Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Perry is the author of 8 books, including the New York Times Bestseller South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation which received the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the inaugural Inside Literary Prize, the only U.S. literary prize judged by incarcerated people.

Perry's other award winning titles include: May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, and Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry. Perry has written for numerous publications including: The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper's and Harpers Bazaar. She is a 2023 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. She has also received Guggenheim and Pew Fellowships. Her next book: Black in Blues: How a Color Tells The Story of My People, will be published in January of 2025.