{"id":2793,"date":"2025-01-02T23:22:11","date_gmt":"2025-01-02T23:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=2793"},"modified":"2025-01-02T23:22:11","modified_gmt":"2025-01-02T23:22:11","slug":"at-lorna-simpsons-show-a-constellation-of-galactic-and-human-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=2793","title":{"rendered":"At Lorna Simpson\u2019s Show, a Constellation of Galactic and Human History"},"content":{"rendered":"


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A reverberating hum in the air, a great rush of wind, a hot, sulfuric smell.<\/p>\n

Such was the whirl of sensations that accompanied a meteorite when it landed in Baldwyn, Miss. in 1922,<\/a> striking the earth just feet from where a Black tenant farmer named Ed Bush was standing. The rock had alighted on farmland owned by Bush\u2019s landlord, a white judge named Allen Cox. Seven years later, an entry on the meteorite was written up in a scientific volume called \u201cMinerals From Earth and Sky<\/a>,\u201d where Cox is named but Bush, anonymized, is described merely as a \u201cnegro tenant who was badly frightened\u201d by the event.<\/p>\n

Lorna Simpson encountered this book several years ago and has since remained curious about the stuff-of-legends yet little-known story of Bush\u2019s cosmic encounter. Her show at Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea is a body of work made in response to this bewildering kernel of human-and-galactic history.<\/p>\n

Simpson meets the daunting beauty of the celestial sphere with a painterly language of stellar silvers and penumbral grays. At the heart of it she wrestles with a question: How do the hard, constraining realities of Earth \u2014 such as the historical obscuring of figures like Ed Bush \u2014 face the grand magnitude of that which lies beyond it?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n