Laurie Simmons facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Laurie Simmons
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| Born | 1949 |
| Education | Tyler School of Art |
| Known for | Photography, film, sculpture |
| Spouse(s) | Carroll Dunham |
| Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship, American Academy in Rome, National Endowment for the Arts |
Laurie Simmons (born 1949) is an American artist best known for her photographic and film work. Art historians consider her a key figure of The Pictures Generation and a group of late-1970s women artists that emerged as a counterpoint to the male-dominated and formalist fields of painting and sculpture. The group introduced new approaches to photography, such as staged setups, narrative, and appropriations of pop culture and everyday objects that pushed the medium toward the center of contemporary art. Simmons's elaborately constructed images employ psychologically charged human proxies—dolls, ventriloquist dummies, mannequins, props, miniatures and interiors—and also depict people as dolls. Often noted for its humor and pathos, her art explores boundaries such as between artifice and truth or private and public, while raising questions about the construction of identity, tropes of prosperity, consumerism and domesticity, and practices of self-presentation and image-making. In a review of Simmons's 2019 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, critic Steve Johnson wrote, "Collectively—and with a sly but barbed sense of humor—[her works] challenge you to think about what, if anything, is real: in our gender roles, and our cultural assumptions, and our perceptions of others."
Simmons's art belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Hara Museum (Tokyo) and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, among others. She has exhibited at venues including MoMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Walker Art Center and Whitney Museum. In 1997, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives and works in New York City and Cornwall, Connecticut.
Early life and career
Simmons was born in 1949 in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, the daughter of Jewish parents, Dorothy "Dot" Simmons, a homemaker, and Samuel "Sam" Simmons, a dentist. She spent her formative years in Great Neck, Long Island and began photographing at the age of six, with a Kodak Brownie camera her father gave her. She studied printmaking, painting and sculpture at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, earning a BFA in 1971.
After graduating, Simmons traveled in Europe and lived in a commune-like situation in upstate New York; while there she purchased a cache of toys and dollhouse furniture from a failing toy store and began experimenting with photography. In 1973, she moved to SoHo, sharing a loft with the late photographer Jimmy DeSana, who helped her set up a darkroom; Simmons is executor of the Jimmy DeSana Estate/Trust. She started working with life-like set-ups using old dollhouses, dolls and the toys she purchased—a unique approach then, which reflected her encounter with a contemporary art scene open to new forms. Her first solo exhibitions took place at Artists Space (1979), MoMA PS1 (1979) and Metro Pictures (1981, initiating a 20-year relationship) in New York and at the Walker Art Center (1987), among other venues.
In subsequent years, she exhibited at Sperone Westwater and Salon 94 in New York, Amanda Wilkinson Gallery in London, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and Jewish Museum (Manhattan). Retrospectives of her work have been held at the San Jose Museum of Art (1990), Baltimore Museum of Art (1997), Gothenburg Museum of Art (2012), Neues Museum Nürnberg (2014), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2018) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2019). She also exhibited in the Whitney Biennial (1985, 1991), Bienal de São Paulo (1985), Biennale of Sydney (1986) and Austrian Triennial on Photography (1996), and surveys at MOCA LA, MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others.
Personal life
Simmons lives and works in New York City and Cornwall, Connecticut with her husband, painter Carroll Dunham. They have two children: writer, director and actress Lena Dunham and Cyrus Dunham, author of the memoir A Year Without A Name, actor and activist.
Collections and recognition
Simmons's work is held in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago, Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Hara Museum, High Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, Jewish Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), MOCA LA, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Tate, Walker Art Center, Weatherspoon Art Museum and Whitney Museum, among others.
She has been recognized with a Women in the Arts Award from the Brooklyn Museum (2013), an American Academy in Rome residency (2005), a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship (1997) and a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1984). In 2016, the International Center of Photography named her its sixth "Spotlights" honoree for her contributions to visual culture.
See also
In Spanish: Laurie Simmons para niños
