Mastery of Scale: Lorna Simpson’s Source Notes at The Met

Installation view of Lorna Simpson: Source Notes, on view May 19–November 2, 2025 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Eileen Travell, Courtesy of The Met

By KURT COLE EIDSVIG November 18th, 2025

Entering the rooms for Lorna Simpson: Source Notes at The Metropolitan Museum of Art was like walking into a vast cave with huge waterfalls. Deep dark blues shift to ultramarines. Figures and rocks appear in the cascading colors that give way to silver and granite tones.  Works like Night Fall (2023), Specific Notation (2019), and True Value (2015) dominate the gallery walls, each towering more than twice the height of an average viewer. Built on wood or fiberglass panels and often weighing close to a hundred pounds, these massive pieces make scale itself part of the experience, forcing visitors to look up and feel the physical weight and awe Lorna Simpson’s work commands.

In this attention to scale, the works cast viewers into childlike awe. All of us spend our early years crane-necked at our parents and elders, and a world designed to be eye level with adults. In Source Notes, we return to that sense of wonder and curiosity. Then we rush forward into those humbling moments as adults, when we stare up at the stars or search for some sign of God or the angels. By design, Lorna Simpson at The Met forces us into this pose. 

We aren’t just walking at the bottom of a tropical cave or swimming in the depths of an underwater cavern. The weight of this flood presses us in: a flood of emotion, of evocative expressionism, and of intricately placed imagery. The size of the canvases is all the greater when a single slip of a rendered eye peeks out to underscore how at odds we all are with our surroundings. Lorna Simpson’s monumental paintings gathered here include collages and sculptures that transform found photographs from Ebony and Jet magazines into vast scenes of glacial landscapes, fragmented portraits, and cosmic meteorites, merging figuration and abstraction to explore race, gender, identity, history, and the unstable nature of representation. Here we are, turned into intrusive characters in the Edgar Allan Poe story, The Cask of Amontillado, as we realize there is more than the flood. There is carnage in body parts and embedded people to be excavated in this archaeology of the eyes.

Simpson’s decade-long transformation, from her early collages and the Ice series to her recent Earth & Sky paintings, has been a study in controlled metamorphosis. Each work is a hybrid of conceptual rigor and painterly immediacy. Her screenprints of women culled from magazines blur into geological strata and glacial washes, merging the body with the landscape. 

We are currently embedded in the year of Robert Rauschenberg. On the occasion of his centennial, shows like Five Friends (Munich, April–August 2025; Cologne, October 2025–January 2026), Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World (Museum of the City of New York, September 2025–March 2026), Robert Rauschenberg: Fabric Works of the 1970s (The Menil Collection, Houston, September 2025–March 2026), and Robert Rauschenberg: Image and Gesture (Kunsthalle Krems, March–October 2026) are omnipresent in the cultural landscape. Source Notes invites a comparison between Rauschenberg and Simpson due to their handling of both representational and abstract. Both traverse the tightrope of photography, found imagery, and painterly expressionism.

But Rauschenberg’s inventiveness is more exuberant and unhinged in comparison to Simpson’s handling of the competing styles. Rauschenberg is more like a compulsive and energetic house cat bringing dead birds, snakes, and all manner of backyard junk to our doorsteps. At the same time, Simpson’s art conveys a more singular and powerful imagery. Maybe it’s the vastness of the Rauschenberg collection. More likely, there is a different intensity of attention and intent in Simpson. This reflects back to the viewer as well. We aren’t just awed by the depths of creativity and invention in Simpson. We struggle to come to grips with our own perspectives, experiences, and selves. Rauschenberg’s genius lies in retaining a childlike fun and creativity, casting his audience as fellow children and keeping us all in a playground of artistic imagination, all at eye level and encouraged to play as well. In contrast, Simpson keeps us in a childlike position and brings our eyes to the sky. Just as we are awed by mountain tops or the tails of shooting stars, her work demands that we turn inward to ourselves. Who are we? What is this? And what is our place here?

This attention carries into Simpson’s approach to portraiture. Mind Reader (2019), at first, appears as a single portrait surrounded by a thick yellow mass on every side. But this work, and others in her Special Characters series, are composite images built up from several sources and washed with vivid inks. Mind Reader includes one woman’s eyes staring out, disrupted by the superimposition of another face. We see here the conglomerate of personas we all inhabit. The technique also mimics the flicks and glances inherent in a personal connection as we get closer to those around us. Works like this show Simpson’s ability to transcend the confines of traditional portraiture and create an intimate, layered experience; literally layered in meaning, subtext, and material.

The Source Notes exhibition ends with her newest meteorite paintings, works born from a Smithsonian text describing a 1922 meteor that fell near a Mississippi farm, witnessed by an unnamed Black tenant. Simpson freezes those stones in descent, giving them the gravity of memory. Black and silver surfaces glint like photographic negatives or celestial scars. The paintings hum with the impact of the meteor, the gaze, and the act of seeing suspended mid-fall.

The Rothko Chapel invites similar reverence, but Simpson’s flood is different. It’s not silence she asks for, it’s surrender. We’re submerged in her cosmos of color and collision, pulled under by gravity and history, surfacing only when we remember to breathe.

Lorna Simpson: Source Notes was on view from May 19 to November 2, 2025, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. WM