Teenage Angst Monthly

junicorn 3. botanicals / sage

Along with Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson represents the youngest generation of artists in We Wanted a Revolution. Their work recasts the political concerns of earlier activist generations through the combination of photography and text that emerged in the 1980s.

In this work, the waterbearer disrupts her task, pouring water with abandon. The paired text describes how women’s stories are often undermined and ignored. Personal and cultural memory are frequent themes of Simpson’s work. Waterbearer was reproduced in B Culture magazine in 1987, where influential feminist author bell hooks first encountered it, referring to the disregard of the female subject’s experience as “subjugated knowledge.”