Coreen Simpson: A Monograph

The second title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series, created and coedited by Drs. Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, showcases the luminous, wide-ranging contributions of an essential artist.Coreen Simpson—photographer, writer, jeweler—has done it all. Working for publications such as Essence, Unique New York, and The Village Voice, from the late 1970s onward, Simpson covered New York’s art and fashion scenes, producing portraits of a wide range of Black artists, literary figures, and celebrities. Her iconic jewelry, the Black Cameo, has been worn by everyone from the model Iman to civil-rights leader Rosa Parks.This long-awaited volume, Simpson’s first, features her celebrated B-Boys series—portraits of young people coming of age during the early years of hip-hop—as well as her experiments with collage and other formal interventions. An assortment of essays and an extended interview offer powerful reflections on Simpson’s unique blend of portraiture, sartorial politics, and her riveting story of an intrepid life in journalism, art, and fashion.

Coreen Simpson (born in New York, 1942) is a celebrated photographer and jewelry designer from Brooklyn, whose career has spanned more than five decades. Her work has been featured in Essence, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and Vogue, among other publications. Her photographs are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Bronx Museum; Le Musée de la Photographie, Belgium; and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, among others. Sarah Lewis is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and associate professor of African and African American studies at Harvard University and the founder of Vision & Justice. She is an award-winning art and cultural historian whose books and edited volumes include The Rise (2014), the “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture magazine (2016), Carrie Mae Weems (2021), The Unseen Truth (2024), and Vision & Justice (2025). Deborah Willis is an author and curator whose pioneering research focuses on cultural histories, the Black body, women, and gender. She is a celebrated photographer, acclaimed historian of photography, MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, and university professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Willis is also a coeditor of the Vision & Justice Book Series. Bridget R. Cooks is professor of art history and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on African American artists, Black visual culture, and museum criticism. She is author of Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (2011) and her writing can be found in dozens of art exhibition catalogs and academic publications such as Afterall, Afterimage, American Studies, Aperture, and American Quarterly. Awol Erizku’s multimedia work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Gagosian, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas; Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto; Ben Brown Gallery, Hong Kong; Sean Kelly Gallery, Los Angeles; and FLAG Art Foundation, New York. Aperture published his first major monograph, Mystic Parallax, in 2023. He lives and works in Los Angeles. Doreen St. Félix is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She is a winner of a National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. Rujeko Hockley is the Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she cocurated the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Additional projects at the Whitney include Amy Sherald: American Sublime (2025), Inheritance (2023), and Julie Mehretu (2021). In 2017, she cocurated We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85, which originated at the Brooklyn Museum and traveled to three additional US venues in 2017–18. Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. From 2000 to 2017, she was at th