This same confidence gave her the courage to create conceptual work on her own terms, as she did while enrolled in the master’s program at the University of California San Diego in the mid-’80s. Even before she started working as a photojournalist in the early 1980s, documenting street scenes in New York while an undergraduate at the School of Visual Arts, she considered herself an artist her healthy ego was a shield against the racism and sexism - “old-timey bull,” as she calls it - she endured while a student there. She attended an arts high school, and her decision to pursue an arts degree at college was, she says, almost unconscious. Growing up in Brooklyn and Queens, Simpson was immersed in the art world from a young age. The responsibility she feels to nurture the next generation (especially her 23-year-old daughter, Zora Simpson Casebere) has helped - and so has working. Now, the masks are off on all levels no more hiding under a guise.” During this period, the Brooklyn-born artist, who is currently splitting her time between New York and Los Angeles, has, she said, had to resist falling apart. “As a human being,” Simpson told me recently, “the sense of people not giving a about anything, I’ve always found that disturbing. She first conceived of “Earth & Sky” in 2016, when the election of Donald Trump sparked a national reckoning with America’s legacy of white supremacy in the weeks and months that followed the release of the Rihanna images, a period that brought the Capitol insurrection and nationwide conflicts over mask mandates and vaccines, the country’s divisions seemed starker than ever. It allows her, for example, to highlight at once in a single work the reductive ways in which pop culture and the media depict Black women, and their true beauty and multiplicity. Juxtaposition is a common motif in Simpson’s work, one that the artist often uses to present her subjects in ways that evade the white patriarchal gaze. In one work, Rihanna towers over an entire cityscape, larger than life (on set, Simpson directed her to walk and pose as if she were a giant) the contrasting scales of the background and foreground cast the singer in a different light than that in which she is typically portrayed - less musician or paparazzi subject, more mythical being. The Rihanna collages spanned a dozen of the issue’s pages, in addition to the cover, and in each portrait the artist superimposed photographs she took of the singer over archival images sourced from The Associated Press, decades-old Ebony magazines and even 19th-century geological lithographs. The work was a continuation of Simpson’s ongoing “ Earth & Sky” series, in which she replaces the hairdos of Black women in vintage advertisements with decoupaged images of precious metals and cosmic matter, challenging notions that our hair is anything less than sublime. In January, the artist Lorna Simpson awed readers of Essence magazine with collages featuring photographs of that month’s cover star, Rihanna.