15 Mouths

“15 Mouths” consists of 15 tightly cropped photographs of people’s lips, each with a short text below it, all installed on a wall, along with an audio recording of an ensemble humming (not singing the lyrics of) the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart tune “It’s Easy to Remember (And So Hard to Forget)”. Simpson chose the song specifically as she has vivid memories of John Coltrane’s version of the song being present throughout her childhood. The text below each image of lips could potentially refer to the internal monologues inside the head (not shown) to whom the lips belong. As Holland Cotter wrote in the New York Times, “Much of Lorna Simpson’s photo-based work has been about African-American identity approached from an oblique and elusive perspective. Most of the figures in her pictures, usually black women, were filmed with their backs to the camera, as if to make them generic presences, adaptable to any narrative. The implication is that there are many narratives about race available, all of them conditional and subjective, created by the pressures of personal experience, interpretation and memory.”