Sylvia Salazar Simpson dips a spoon into a simmering pot of beans and in one continuous gesture pulls it out and lets a few drops of the liquid drip inside of her palm. She’s doing this as if she’s done it a million times because she has. With her tongue, she sucks the drop clean from her hand. She likes the taste and turns off the stove. The beans are done.
Next to Simpson, where she’s preparing lunch in her Los Angeles apartment, is a freshly grilled pile of sweet plantains. On the counter behind her is a batch of bright crimson jamaica. In her living room/studio, resting on the fireplace mantle, is a rotting squash, so decayed that it’s indistinguishable from the equally gray and green lemon close by. Most of the shelves, walls and windows are covered with decaying produce, dying flowers, cactus paddles, and even a cockroach she found belly-up on her doorstep.
“My granddaughter isn’t even allowed in here. She might get some rare disease,” Simpson says. She shakes her head laughing and clarifies, “She won’t get some rare disease.”
For over 50 years, Simpson, who is now 80, with her art installations, photography and books, has utilized perishable materials, placing them alongside other types of objects to fashion spaces that turn ordinary life into imaginary worlds, where things we perceive to be separate come together: sustenance and decay, sensuality and grotesqueness, Mexico and the United States, the visible and the invisible. She explores these intersections by bringing visceral responses up to the surface.
Simpson explains that when someone walks into a room she wants them to say “Yes!” and “Oh, this is a mess,” and then maybe, “Why did she do this?” Her vibrant appearance reflects this confident attitude. She is draped in a multi-colored dress that wraps around her neck, revealing her shoulders and back. Her lips are carefully outlined to enhance the color and her eye-lids are painted with dark blue liner that matches her nails.
Simpson was born in 1939 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She grew up in Mexico City from the time she was eight years old, until she got married at 25 and moved to Los Angeles with her husband. She studied at Otis College and then at the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970’s, with her mentor and friend Allan Kaprow. Vaughn Rachel, Allan Kaprow’s wife at the time, was a close friend of Simpsons and influenced her to go.
During this period, Simpson made a series of 18 stunning black-and-white self-portraits. She assembled and wove her hair with different kinds of food —corn, octopus, tortillas, radishes, pigs feet, dates, apples, pineapple, grapes, tripe, lettuce, watermelon, mushrooms, cilantro, macaroni, bananas, cheese, and carrots. In each image she stares into a mirror, standing so close that it obscures her face entirely. The food, interlaced into her hair, is the focal point — and even though you can comprehend that it’s food, the shapes take on an otherworldly quality.
Simpson’s artwork, and this photo-series, was included in Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, at the Hammer Museum in 2017-2018, as a part of Pacific Standard Time: Latin American & Latino Art in LA. The exhibition showed the work of 120 women, some who are well known but many who haven’t necessarily been recognized for their work.
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, who co-curated Radical Women, first learned about Simpson through the magazine, Artes Visuales, when she was organizing the exhibition. The editor, Carla Stellweg, told her: “They call her the Hannah Wilkes of Los Angeles.” But despite Simpson’s reputation, most people have never heard about her work.
“Sylvia has basically been completely erased from the history of art in Los Angeles. [She] told me at some point all of these super conceptual artists who were her peers decided to produce works for the market and she didn’t,” says Fajardo-Hill. “[This is] her moment to be recuperated.”
Simpson’s Antes-Después (Before-After) (1981), a series of four color-photographs, was also in the exhibition. The framed piece rests on stacks of books in her bedroom. In these images, she looks at the camera head-on. Her hair is covered in plant material and a clump of live worms cascades down her face.
Working with organic materials comes from Simpson’s attention to her senses. Especially her nose. It’s her compass.
“I smell when I walk down the street and when I step on the grass, I smell. The perception of reality that comes through my nose is very important to me,” she says.
She is particularly fascinated by that place that good and bad smells meet. This stems from her day-to-day life from activities like riding the bus. “I love to walk into a place where it smells. Even when it’s disagreeable smell. When it’s agreeable with disagreeable, it’s even better,” she says. This pleasure is something Simpson translates into her art, by working with foods that hold various smells. And when she allows them to perish, there’s the potential for new and oftentimes unsettling odors to emerge.
For Simpson, smell and the senses, more generally, are a portal to memory. And it’s directly tied to her personal memories with food. She recalls her childhood in Mexico, going to a Sunday market in Chiapas with her father and the smell of cilantro consuming the air. She ate voraciously, trying all of the different foods in the market. But later, when they returned to Mexico City, she became ill. For many years after that, she wasn’t able to eat cilantro. She connected the smell too much with the experience.
But it wasn’t all bad. In the hospital she remembers that the doctors would give her different kinds of candy to make sure she was eating.
“I remember that, you know. Loving the sweet and remembering the jungle.”
The objects in Simpson’s apartment tell her story. Personal items, like a pair of apple-green shorts she just bought.“You put them on with black stockings,” she says laying them out on her bed. Then momentarily, she disappears into the hallway to find photos she took after the house she was living in burned down in the 1993 Malibu fires.
Instead, to her delight, she comes across a series of photographs she hasn’t seen in years. They are from a show called Tortilla Curtain (1991) that was installed in an airplane hanger in El Centro, on the border of California and Mexico.
In the installation, she hung tortillas, chicken feet and candy from the ceiling with ropes. Mixed with flowers and other types of materials, like cracked eggs on the floor, she made an immersive space for visitors. Even through photos, you can easily imagine how your senses would be saturated walking through the space, seeing so much raw meat next to you and exposed egg yoke by your feet. The documentation is its own art. In one photo of Simpson’s face hovering close to a pointy chicken nail, the scene is alive, you can almost smell it.
Sifting through Simpson’s stories in her apartment is like this — a continuous process. She’ll point to an object in a photo and then pulls the real-life version out of a jar nearby. It’s as if her art is held together in one cohesive montage made up of her past, present and future.
Simpson recalls the exhibition, LA Women Narrations (1978), where she covered a nude man and woman in peanut butter, dead fish, and pomegranate seeds, with cotton candy on their heads. They posed like the Cervatari sarcophagus: a terracotta statue of a dead married couple laying on their sides. In Simpson’s piece, the couple was wheeled around throughout the galleries by actors pretending to be morgue attendants. According to Simpson, it was controversial. She explains that she was explicitly asked to cover their genitals because there would be alcohol served at the opening of the exhibition, and “it wasn’t just my opening, it was an opening for several other women.”
Simpson’s solution was to make covers out of gauze, peanut butter and flowers. But the gauze kept falling off. “So what I finally did. I said, ‘get the fucking gauze out of here’ and threw it out and then just did flowers.” Simpson says the curator vowed never to work with her again because she didn’t consider Simpson’s work art.
“There’s some people that can be insulting. Some people that consider what I do a lesser form of amusement,” she says, referring to how some people over the years have responded to her work. But her serious tone quickly turns into a soft chuckle.
Ultimately, she appears unfazed and continues to make her art. Her imagination is active as she fantasizes about new worlds she wants to experience. Some of these are simple, but coming from her, they all sound extraordinary.
Her eyes are brimming with joy as she shares her fantasy about jackfruit.
“One of my best friends lives in Puebla in Mexico, and they have jackfruits at his mother’s house that grow from one side of the kitchen door all the way down to the other. Can you imagine? I just want to go see that. Must be beautiful. Can you imagine?”