Laurie Simmons (born October 3, 1949) is an American photographer and filmmaker.Lubow, Arthur. "Influenced by Her Children, Laurie Simmons Exits Her Comfort Zone," The New York Times, April 27, 2018. Retrieved April 9, 2024.Eckardt, Steph. "How the Artist Laurie Simmons Made a Movie in Spite of Everything," W, May 2, 2017. Retrieved April 9, 2024. 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.Eklund, Douglas. The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009. Retrieved April 11, 2024.Johnson, Steve. "Laurie Simmons Talks About Her MCA Photography Show And How Daughter Lena Dunham Helped Her Explain Her Work," Chicago Tribune, February 27, 2019. Retrieved April 9, 2024.Shockman, Elizabeth. "Tiny furniture, art and being the mom of Lena Dunham," Public Radio International, April 16, 2016. Retrieved April 9, 2024. 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.Kimmelman, Michael. "Laurie Simmons—Photographs 1978-79: 'Interiors' and 'Big Figures'," The New York Times, June 7, 2002. Retrieved April 9, 2024.Yablonsky, Linda. "Better, More Surreal Homes and Collages," The New York Times, February 15, 2004. Retrieved April 9, 2024.Johnson, Ken. "Laurie Simmons: In and Around the House," The New York Times, June 20, 2008, p. E18. Retrieved April 11, 2024. Simmons's elaborately constructed images employ psychologically charged human proxies—dolls, ventriloquist dummies, mannequins, props, miniatures and interiors—and also depict people as dolls.Sheets, Hilarie M. "In the Studio: Laurie Simmons," Art + Auction, October 2007, p. 72–78.Russeth, Andrew. "Laurie Simmons: Eyes Wide Shut," ARTnews, March 4, 2015. Retrieved April 9, 2024. 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.Noyes, Chandra. "Laurie Simmons' Big Career Photographing Little Things," Art & Object, February 27, 2019. Retrieved April 10, 2024.Sanchez, Gabriel H. "Laurie Simmons," Artforum, April 18, 2014. Retrieved April 10, 2024.Sheets, Hilarie M. "Laurie Simmons," ARTnews, April 28, 2015. Retrieved April 17, 2024. 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,Metropolitan Museum of Art. Laurie Simmons. Retrieved April 9, 2024. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),Museum of Modern Art. Laurie Simmons. Retrieved April 9, 2024. Los Angeles County Museum of Art,Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Laurie Simmons. Retrieved April 9, 2024. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Laurie Simmons. Retrieved April 9, 2024. Hara Museum (Tokyo)Hara Museum. "STOPGAP – Homage to Rauschenberg: Selections from the Hara Museum Collection," Exhibitions. Retrieved April 9, 2024. and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, among others.Stedelijk Museum. Sarah Charlesworth, Robert Garratt, General Idea, Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, Peter Nagy, Laurie Simmons. Retrieved April 9, 2024. She has exhibited at venues including MoMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,Goldstein, Ann, Mary Jane Jacob and Catherine Gudis. A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1989. Retrieved April 11, 2024. Walker Art CenterSimmons, Laurie. Laurie Simmons: Water Ballet/Family Collision, Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 1987 and Whitney Museum.Whitney Museum of American Art. Laurie Simmons. Retrieved April 9, 2024. In 1997, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Laurie Simmons, Fellows. Retrieved April 9, 2024. She lives and works in New York City and Cornwall, Connecticut.Thornton, Sarah. "Side by Side. Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons, soldiering on together," The Economist, August 11, 2010.
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.Oliver, Charlotte. "Latex doll images inflate the appeal of V&A photographer," The Jewish Chronicle, November 24, 2016. Retrieved April 10, 2024. 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.Art21. "Photography, Perfection, and Reality: Laurie Simmons," 2007. Retrieved April 9, 2024. She studied printmaking, painting and sculpture at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, earning a BFA in 1971.Soo, Youn. "This Artist Subverts Housewife Stereotypes," New York Magazine, November 3, 2016. Retrieved April 11, 2024.Shattuck, Kathryn. "I Like to Imagine People Imagining I'm From Anywhere," The New York Times, July 6, 1997. Retrieved April 10, 2024.
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.Trillin, Calvin. "A Doll's House," The New Yorker, December 10, 2012. 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),Lifson, Ben. "Laurie Simmons," The Village Voice, February 12, 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.Heartney, Eleanor. "Laurie Simmons at Metro Pictures," Art in America, June 1988, p. 160–61.Reilly, Maura. "Laurie Simmons at Metro Pictures," Art in America, February 1999, p. 108.
In subsequent years, she exhibited at Sperone WestwaterGlueck, Grace. "Laurie Simmons: 'The Instant Decorator'," The New York Times, March 26, 2004. Retrieved April 9, 2024.Cohen, David. "Nordic Gloom & Dancing Mannequins," The New York Sun, June 8, 2006, p. 15. and Salon 94 in New York,Johnson, Ken. "Laurie Simmons: 'The Love Doll: Days 1-30'," The New York Times, March 3, 2011. Retrieved April 9, 2024. 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),Cameron, Dan and Laurie Simmons. Laurie Simmons, San Jose, CA: San Jose Museum of Art, 1990. Retrieved April 11, 2024. Baltimore Museum of Art (1997),Goldberg, Vicki. "The Doll Houses That Sheltered So Many Dreams," The New York Times, July 6, 1997. Retrieved April 10, 2024. Gothenburg Museum of Art (2012),Gothenburg Museum of Art. Laurie Simmons, Exhibitions. Retrieved April 11, 2024. Neues Museum Nürnberg (2014),Neues Museum Nürnberg. "The Fabulous World of Laurie Simmons," Exhibitions. Retrieved April11, 2024. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2018) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2019).Lobel, Michael. "Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera," Artforum, October 2018. Retrieved April 10, 2024.Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera, Exhibitions. Retrieved April 9, 2024. 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.Metropolitan Museum of Art. "'Pictures Generation' of New York Contemporary Artists Featured in Spring Metropolitan Museum Exhibition,", Exhibitions, 2009. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
Work and reception
In her career spanning more than four decades, Simmons has used the camera to explore psycho-social subtexts involving gender, social convention, identity and cultural aspiration, often by considering ways that objects are humanized and people—particularly women—are objectified. Central to her work are visual contrivances such as manipulation of scale and photography's capacity to deceive, inanimate human surrogates, which mediate subjects, creating a sense of remove and disjuncture often described as uncanny and unsettling.Smith, Roberta. "Actual Photos," Art in America, January 1986.MacAdam, Barbara A. "Laurie Simmons at Sperone Westwater," ARTnews, June 2004, p. 112.Hering, Dierdre. "The Lifeless Eyes of Laurie Simmons's Human Dolls," Hyperallergic, July 22, 2015. Retrieved April 11, 2024. Simmons's striking uses of color, pattern and lighting are often cited as important factors in her work's articulation of cultural memory, emotion and interiority. Critics also identify a performative aspect to her photographs akin to cinema, in which elements like set-building, role-playing or body-painting are as central as the act of photographing itself.
According to New York Times critic Ken Johnson, "Simmons is counted as a core member of the Pictures Generation, whose appropriations, manipulations and simulations of various photographic genres profoundly altered the course of late-20th-century art." The group emerged in the aftermath of conceptual art and the sociopolitical upheavals of the 1970s, offering a critical, often playful examination of an increasingly media-saturated world.Eklund, Douglas. "The Pictures Generation,", Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004. Retrieved April 9, 2024. Their work—and for the women, their prominence in the field—represented a radical departure from the art norms of the time. Critics particularly connect Simmons's work with that of New York contemporaries Cindy Sherman and Sarah Charlesworth, whose photography also made use of personal and collective memory, pop culture and everyday objects in order to restage, rework or subvert socio-cultural constructions.Simmons, Laurie. "Sarah Charlesworth (1947–2013)," Artforum, November 10, 2013. Retrieved April 9, 2024.