Artist Lorna Simpson centers Griner’s steadfast gaze, superseded by a celestial overlay of meteor showers
July 27, 2022 7:52 PM EDT, she has no trouble imagining a vulnerability of the kind that Griner, another Black American woman, has been experiencing since being detained in Russia since February.
“In February, as Russia’s threats of invasion in Ukraine escalated, watching the airport surveillance video of Brittney Griner passing through security made my heart sink,” Simpson—whose art re-contextualizes narratives around race, gender, and identity through collages of found photos—told TIME. “One of my greatest fears as a teenager growing up in Queens, N.Y., was always imprisonment.”
Griner, a two-time Olympic gold athlete, eight-time WNBA all-star and player for the Phoenix Mercury in the WNBA and for Russia’s UMMC Ekaterinburg during the off-season,—just one week before Russia invaded Ukraine—after customs officials at the airport found vape cartridges with traces of cannabis oil in her suitcase.
For the cover of this issue of the magazine, to accompany Sean Gregory’s profile of Griner and the effort to bring her home, Simpson created an image that reimagined a standard media-day portrait, by photographer Stephen Gosling, of Griner in her WNBA uniform. The collage centers Griner’s steadfast gaze, but with her uniform superseded by a celestial overlay of meteor showers—taken from a 19th century print—that extends into the background.
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