Lorna Simpson
(Artist Catalog)

Book Design
Typography

(Art Center College of Design 2020)
Instructor: Stephen Serrato

The artist catalog celebrates African-American photographer and multimedia artist, Lorna Simpson's art life and accomplishment. The book cover comes from Simpson’s work “Partitions and Time”, which is a two-panel image each showing the back of a female figure. Lorna Simpson’s work of people showing their backs to the audience is one of her strongest visual language, that resonates with French philosopher Michel Foucault’s proposition that by turning away from others, the figures turn toward themselves. They grant importance to their own person.

Catalog

Simpson’s conceptual, visual language of fragments and deconstruction was translated to the processing of catalog layout. Some of the images of works are bleeding off the edge of pages, and some of them are split by columns of text. The edge of paper even split artworks, yet they become complete when the reader wrap around the page. The juxtaposition of fragmentation and the continuous flow of the narrative within the catalog creates a connotation of the history of Africa American people.