Her incendiary collages of vintage black pinups made her one of the most influential artists of her time. Now she’s battling the ‘insanity’ of Trump’s America

Lorna Simpson is holed up in Los Angeles with her actor daughter right now. She’s been spending lockdown doing one of her favourite things: reflecting on how people present themselves when out in public. All this people-watching has put her in mind of the 1990s, when she would go wig-hunting in Fulton Mall, a blue-collar shopping centre near her home in New York.

“Shop after shop sold all sorts of wigs,” says the 59-year-old. “Human hair, yak hair, synthetic hair.” Simpson bought as many as she could, in every style she saw: from platinum-blonde “Lana Turner” wigs to fake afros and braids. She transferred photographs of each one on to panels of felt before hanging them alongside such seemingly disconnected phrases as: “First impressions are the most lasting.” The wigs were a “surrogate”, she says, a way to explore “the person we see ourselves to be”.

Just as the Caucasian figure in contemporary art is seen as universal, the black figure of African descent should be too

Any society, or self, constructed to always separate itself from the other is doomed

Lorna Simpson: Give Me Some Moments is at Hauser & Wirth’s website

A teenager bonds awkwardly with her cousin as they take the bus from a rural community to New York so that she can have a termination

The four words in this title are the four possible replies to bureaucratic tick-box questions about the frequency of your various sexual experiences. A young woman here must answer them, before she is allowed to have an abortion. However rigid and blandly routine it seems, the four-part answer grid is cleverly designed to get information about vulnerability: it is so easy instinctively and evasively to deny a difficult question structured as a yes/no, but much harder to check the “never” box, when “rarely”, “sometimes” and “always” are coolly offered as equivalently non-judgmental options.

The lead character in Eliza Hittman’s tough, realist drama is confronted with this central, four-part inquisition about her life in one brilliantly controlled, enigmatic scene. Theoretically, it is just a bit of form-filling that doesn’t appear to promise any real revelation to the audience. Yet it does just that, delivering a penny-drop moment of realisation. Or perhaps it’s more of an ambiguous hint and all the more disquieting for that.

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