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Diane Simpson (born 1935) is a Chicago artist who creates contemporary sculpture and preparatory drawings that evolve from a diverse range of sources, including architecture, utilitarian objects, and clothing.

Contents

 * 1Early life and education
 * 2Career
 * 2.1Style
 * 2.2Themes
 * 3Work
 * 3.1Major exhibitions
 * 3.2Public collections
 * 4References
 * 5External links

Early life and education
Diane Simpson nearly completed her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1957, but left just one quarter short of graduating, in the ninth month of her first pregnancy. She returned when her youngest child started first grade, and applied for graduate school when she turned forty. Simpson ultimately earned a BFA in 1971 and an an MFA in 1978, both from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her first exhibition was in 1979, when she was in her mid-forties.

Career
Simpson has exhibited steadily in the Midwest since the early 1980s, but has recently become more well known nationally and internationally. She lives and works in Wilmette, Illinois.

Style
Simpson uses a wide variety of materials, including wood, metal, MDF, linoleum, fabric, and cardboard. Her primarily freestanding or wall-mounted pieces have an architectural and contemporary appearance, drawing inspiration from clothing forms, "serving as a vehicle for exploring their functional and sociological roles and the influence of the design and architecture of various cultures and periods in history." Many are made from planes slotted together, cut and scored when formed into curves. As described in The New York Times, "Their distorted volumes and perspectives challenge comprehension and confuse inside with out and two with three dimensions."

Her 3D work begins as elaborate sketches and drawings on graph paper, which themselves become part of the work.

Themes
Though Simpson's sources are often specific types of clothing or objects, she states that they always become abstractions. Sometimes considered feminist because of drawing inspiration from the construction of clothing, the work comes more specifically out of personal lived experience: "I guess you could say that my subjects (aprons, uniforms, bibs) are feminist to the extent that they relate to my personal experience as a woman growing up in a particular era. I think they are connected to my childhood memories of crisp white nurses’ uniforms, women’s large full-length aprons, my children’s bibs, or even the catcher’s chest protector from my grandson’s baseball games."

Major exhibitions
"Samurai", Phyllis Kind Gallery, November 1983, was a collection of ten freestanding monumental pieces in MDF and archival cardboard. The series, made between 1981 and 1983, was her response to the final, Grand Guignol battle scene of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epic Kagemusha. For this she studied the construction patterns of Japanese armor, and the resulting work shows the interplay of flat image versus volumes in space.

A retrospective exhibition of over 40 sculptures spanning more than 30 years of work was organized by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs in 2010 and curated by Lanny Silverman.

A retrospective covering 35 years of Simpson's work took place at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in December 2015-March 2016, with Dan Byers as senior curator.

Simpson will be included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. The exhibition opens on May 17 and will be on view through September 22, 2019.

=== Public collections ===


 * Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
 * DePaul University Art Museum, Chicago, Illinois
 * Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
 * Illinois State Museum, Springfield, Illinois
 * Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts
 * James Thompson Center, Chicago: The Illinois Collection, Chicago, Illinois
 * Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France
 * Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois
 * Perez Art Museum, Miami, Florida
 * Racine Art Museum, Racine, Wisconsin
 * Rockford Art Museum, Rockford, Illinois
 * Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania