Artist, Lorna Simpson: Wigs Portfolio comprises of 21 different pieces of felt with images of wigs. I live in Brooklyn and part of the project involved going to Fulton Mall, which is a large mall in downtown Brooklyn that has at least 50 different stores where you can buy all sorts of wigs from human hair to yak hair (laughs) to synthetic hair.
So I spent a couple of afternoons going to each store and buying as many wigs that I thought were as interesting and kind of different from one another in terms of type. There is one wig that looks like a platinum blonde Lana Turner hairstyle from the 1950s. Another wig that has braids that have been configured to fall in curly shapes.
The text panels speak about historical moments in which one's appearance becomes an important challenge. One particular panel discusses a man named Craft and his wife. Enslaved Africans in the South, they decide to escape to the north. His wife is very light skinned. And he is very dark skinned. They decide that she's going to play the part of an elderly white slave owner, and that he will be her servant.
They run into trouble as they approach New York because it is demanded of her to read a particular document, which she cannot read. But she, from being enslaved all that time, has picked up on all the gestures and attitudes of the slave owner. So she would mimic the kind of arrogant mannerisms that she had watched for many years and that actually helped their escape.
This work came at a point where I wanted to talk about the sense that the wearer of the wigs can either become someone else or become closer to the person that one sees oneself to be.