At the remarkable age of 90, renowned sculptor Diane Simpson continues to push artistic boundaries with her largest and most ambitious sculptures to date. The Chicago-based artist, whose distinctive geometric works have been inspired by architecture and historical textiles for over five decades, is currently showcasing her extraordinary artistic evolution in two major exhibitions this fall.
Simpson's artistic journey began in the early 1950s when she was a high school student traveling from her family's home in Joliet, Illinois, into Chicago. "On my L train ride from the train station to the Art Institute, I looked forward to passing close-by to certain buildings," Simpson recalls. Chicago, famously dubbed "the city of the big shoulders" by poet Carl Sandburg, was home to architectural giants like Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies van der Rohe. Seven decades later, the lines and masses of Chicago's formidable architecture remain clearly visible in Simpson's sculptural work.
However, Simpson doesn't portray architectural forms in any straightforward manner. Instead, she presents the world "aslant," as if she were hurtling past on elevated tracks. Her unique artistic approach developed during her return to the Art Institute as an MFA student in the late 1970s, after taking years off following her BFA to raise a family. Initially working with a printmaking technique called collography, which involves affixing materials onto a plate, inking the collaged surface, and printing it onto paper like an intaglio etching, Simpson's compositions gradually grew larger until they could no longer fit on a printing press.
"At that point, they naturally became wall sculptures," Simpson has recalled in interviews. "The works would have some dimensional sections that would angle out off the backing at 45 degrees. They really wanted to pop off the page." It was her professor, Theodore (Ted) Halkin, who encouraged her to take the leap into three dimensions. Though initially skeptical—she had trained as a painter and intended to stay one—this proved to be a major breakthrough.
Simpson's first body of sculptures consisted of five works made entirely from triple-thick cardboard, which she presented in her 1978 graduation show. Though these pioneering works no longer exist, photographs reveal their immaculate construction, which has remained a hallmark of her work ever since. Working in her dining room with a jigsaw blade mounted at 45 degrees, she would miter the pieces together and bring out the patterns of underlying corrugation with crayon rubbings.
The artist's signature technique involves joining all parts at 45-degree angles, resulting in what's known as axonometric projection—though Simpson admits she didn't know that term at the time. This method represents objects with consistent angles and accurate dimensional relationships. While more true to nature than traditional single-point perspective and widely used in architects' technical drawings, axonometry appears distorted to the human eye. As critic John Yau noted in Hyperallergic, "Her work conjures a world in which seeing something does not mean you can possess it."
Simpson quickly discovered art historical precedents for her work in Japanese screens, Ottoman miniatures, and Russian Suprematism. She also found connections to other Chicago artists, particularly her professor Ray Yoshida and peer Christina Ramberg, both of whom combined precise execution with imaginative transformations of everyday subject matter. In the early 1980s, she began referencing historic textiles in her works, giving them titles like "Lambrequin and Peplum" (2017) or "Jabot" (2018).
Japanese kimonos and samurai armor have been particularly important in Simpson's artistic vocabulary. These garments' origami-like shapes depart radically from body lines, imposing rigid geometry on the human form. While Simpson responded to these bold silhouettes, she never incorporated actual garment-making techniques, never learned traditional pattern-cutting, and has always preferred rigid planar materials like MDF, sheet metal, and plastic. She invented her methodology as she progressed, enjoying the intricate construction challenges she sets for herself in complex preparatory drawings.
This fall's exhibitions demonstrate the awe-inspiring results of Simpson's self-generated system. "Formal Wear," a full retrospective at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, showcases decades of phenomenally inventive works. Highlights include the architectonic "Underskirt" (1986), featuring a stepped splay of green lattice sheathed in translucent cotton scrim; "Amish Bonnet" (1992), a graceful curvature of brass tubes perched on a shelf with strong Martin Puryear influences; and the multipart composition "Window Dressing" (2007/8), created after Simpson was offered six street-front showcases at the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin.
"I had never considered such a project and it was certainly a new challenge," Simpson recalls of "Window Dressing." Her primary inspiration came from a 1928 copy of "Merchants Record and Show Window," transforming the Art Deco patterns and curves from its pages into a miniature skyline. Meanwhile, her outdoor sculptures at the Chicago Art Institute represent her largest works to date, part of an exhibition titled "Good for Future"—a phrase taken from a note-to-self Simpson wrote on a drawing roll in the mid-1980s.
These monumental new works feature paired colors—greens, blues, and yellows—completely covering the underlying MDF structures. While this strong palette marks a striking departure, the sculptures maintain Simpson's signature elements: the characteristic skew, vertiginous angles, emphatic spatial carving, and angular monumentality. As one observer noted, "If shipping boxes had their own warrior goddesses, they might look something like this."
Remarkably, Simpson has created all these impressive works in a one-car garage in suburban Wilmette, Illinois, which has served as her studio since graduating in the late 1970s. Only recently has she taken on an assistant, and only because the pieces have become so large and heavy that she cannot move them alone. She has always derived creative energy from her limited working circumstances.
As curator Audrey Wollen notes in the Arts and Letters exhibition publication, Simpson's works "wear her problems, the rooms in the house where she lived, and her resulting systems of ad-hoc solutions, on their (literal) sleeve: light, durable, cheap materials; Flat-Pak style patterns that can be easily moved and stored; methods of fabrication and assembly that are self-taught and done alone."
Unfortunately, following a pattern too common with women artists, museums have been slow to recognize Simpson's greatness. Institutional recognition truly began only with a 2015 solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, curated by Dan Byers. Subsequent presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Nottingham Contemporary, and inclusion in the 2019 Whitney Biennial followed. Next year, she will be the subject of a traveling retrospective organized by the Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation (MUMOK) in Vienna, which will travel to the Sara Hildén Museum in Finland.
At 90, Simpson remains an artist of extraordinary endurance and determination, continuing at the height of her creative powers. While her sculptures are impressive in photographs, they prove positively uncanny in person, appearing somehow "unstuck in space"—an impression that doesn't diminish as viewers circle them. Her material intelligence is best appreciated firsthand, demonstrating what critic Glenn Adamson calls "an unusually pure form of conviction, combined with an equally strong impulse toward the elusive, the purely metaphorical."
For half a century, Simpson has demonstrated a principle that most have yet to learn: it's possible to accept the malleability of everything that surrounds us while also "keeping it real." In an era where various forms of distortion pervade contemporary experience, these virtual-feeling sculptures feel remarkably relevant, offering viewers a unique perspective on space, form, and the relationship between architecture and art.
