The Tip of the Iceberg

This essay considers Lorna Simpson’s Ice paintings, an ongoing series of large ink works depicting Arctic icebergs rendered in deep blues that the artist began in 2019. It studies the artist’s source materials for the works, including nineteenth-century photographs made on polar expeditions, and fragments of text and image taken from Ebony magazine. Reading the iceberg paintings as reflections on race and photography, the essay proposes that Simpson’s work highlights the technological and discursive limits of early photography—its inability to convey color, but also the difficulties of representing “white” and “black” as literal colors and as racial metaphors. Situating the paintings within the broad historical contexts they evoke, it considers nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Arctic exploration and traces the way racialized masculinities informed the obsessive quest for the North Pole. Finally, the essay proposes that icebergs are an apt metaphor for Simpson’s paintings of them as it follows the accumulation of histories condensed in these enigmatic works.