Xaviera Simmons | |
---|---|
Born | 1974 (age 49–50) New York, New York, U.S. |
Education | Bard College |
Known for | Photography Conceptual art Painting Sculpture Performance Installation |
Movement | Contemporary art |
Awards | Socrates Sculpture Park Artist Award alongside Agnes Gund (2019) |
Patron(s) | Agnes Gund |
Xaviera Simmons is an American contemporary artist. She works in photography, performance, painting, video, sound art, sculpture, and installation. [1] Between 2019 and 2020, Simmons was a visiting professor and lecturer at Harvard University. Simmons was a Harvard University Solomon Fellow from 2019-2020. Simmons has stated in her lectures and writings that she is a descendant of Black American enslaved persons, European colonizers and Indigenous persons through the institution of chattel slavery on both sides of her family's lineage.[ citation needed ]
Simmons received her BFA from Bard College in 2004, studying under An-My Lê, Larry Fink, Mitch Epstein, Lucy Sante and Stephen Shore. She completed the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art in 2005, while simultaneously completing a two-year actor-training conservatory with The Maggie Flanigan Studio.[ citation needed ]
Simmons has exhibited works nationally and internationally. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), MoMA PS1 (Long Island City, New York), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Studio Museum in Harlem (New York), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. [2] In 2017, Simmons had a solo exhibition of her work at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. [3]
The 2008 Public Art Fund's program for emerging artists commissioned Simmons to produce a three-week project. The project, Bronx as Studio, used the streets of the Bronx as a space for sidewalk games, classic photographic portraiture, and performance art. Passersby were encouraged to participate in various activities including hopscotch, soapbox speaking, chess, and Double Dutch. Simmons provided props and background elements, against which all of the publics' spontaneous activities were recorded. Color portraits were sent directly back to participants, as a way of completing the process of active, creative participation. [4]
She participated in the Artists Experiment series at the Museum of Modern Art in 2013. Simmons acted as both artist and archivist, tracing the museum's own history while extracting and reinstating examples of political action through gesture. [5]
Coded was a survey exhibition at The Kitchen in 2016. [6] In relation to it, Simmons also created a performance work using archival materials and resources to explore queer history, homoeroticism, and Jamaican dancehall culture. [7] [8]
In 2018, Simmons made a public art installation on Hunter's Point South Park on the East River in Queens, New York. The installation, Convene, consisted of inverted canoes painted in the colors of the national flags of some immigrant populations in the area. [9]
In 2019, Simmon wrote an opinion piece for The Art Newspaper , with the title "Whiteness must undo itself to make way for the truly radical turn in contemporary culture." [10] She also pulled out as a panelist at IdeasCity Bronx, a New Museum festival, when local Bronx organizers shut it down with their concerns. [11]
In 2021, Simmon's work was featured in Polyphonic: Celebrating PAMM's Fund for African American Art, a group show at Pérez Art Museum Miami highlighting artists in the museum collection acquired through the PAMM Fund for African American Art, an initiative created in 2013. Along with Xaviera Simmons, among the exhibiting artists were Faith Ringgold, Tschabalala Self, Romare Bearden, Juana Valdez, Edward Clark, Kevin Beasley, and others. [12]
Simmons' work is held in the following collections, among others:
Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, moving image artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a PhD in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She has been a professor of Current Digital Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich since 2024. Until 2024, she was a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she co-founded the Research Center for Proxy Politics, together with Vera Tollmann and Boaz Levin.
Elizabeth Woodman was an American ceramic artist.
The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)—officially known as the Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County—is a contemporary art museum that relocated in 2013 to the Maurice A. Ferré Park in Downtown Miami, Florida. Founded in 1984 as the Center for the Fine Arts, it became known as the Miami Art Museum from 1996 until it was renamed in 2013 upon the opening of its new building designed by Herzog & de Meuron at 1103 Biscayne Boulevard. PAMM, along with the $275 million Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science and a city park which are being built in the area with completion in 2017, is part of the 20-acre Maurice A. Ferré Park.
José Braulio Bedia Valdés is a Cuban painter currently residing in Florida.
Willie Cole is a contemporary American sculptor, printer, and conceptual and visual artist. His work uses contexts of postmodern eclecticism, and combines references and appropriation from African and African-American imagery. He also has used Dada’s readymades and Surrealism’s transformed objects, as well as icons of American pop culture or African and Asian masks.
Edward "Ed" Clark was an abstract expressionist painter known for his broad, powerful brushstrokes, radiant colors and large-scale canvases. An African-American, his major contributions to modernist painting remained unrecognized until relatively late in his seven-decade career, during which he pioneered the use of shaped canvases and a commercially available push broom to create striking works of art.
Penelope Umbrico is an American artist best known for her work that appropriates images found using search engines and picture sharing websites.
Aïda Ruilova is an American contemporary artist.
Simone Leigh is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States. She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society. Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
Rochelle Feinstein is a contemporary American visual artist who makes abstract paintings, prints, video, sculpture, and installations that explore language and contemporary culture. She was appointed professor in painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art in 1994, where she also served as director of graduate studies, until becoming professor emerita in 2017.
Barbara London is a US curator and writer specializing in new media and sound art. She is best known for founding the video collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and for the leading acquisition of works by Nam June Paik, Laurie Anderson, Bruce Nauman.
Leandro Erlich is an internationally exhibited Argentine conceptual artist.
Bouchra Khalili is a Moroccan-French visual artist. Raised between Morocco and France, she studied Film at Sorbonne Nouvelle and Fine Arts at École nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris-Cergy. She lives in Berlin, Germany.
Carlos Alfonzo (1950–1991) was a Cuban-American painter known for his neo-impressionistic style. His work has been collected by Whitney Museum of American Art and Smithsonian Institution.
Franklin Sirmans is an American art critic, editor, writer, curator and has been the director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) since October 2015. His initiatives there include ensuring that PAMM's art program reflects the community in Miami and securing donations. In his first six months at PAMM, he managed to secure the largest donation of works in the museum's short history, over a hundred pieces of art were donated by Design District developer Craig Robins.
Elle Pérez is an American photographer whose work explores gender identity, intimacy, vulnerability, and the relationship between seeing and love. Pérez is a gender non-conforming trans artist. They are currently an Assistant Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. Pérez is represented by 47 Canal and currently lives and works in New York City.
William Cordova is a contemporary cultural practitioner and interdisciplinary artist currently residing between Lima, Peru; North Miami Beach, Florida; and New York.
Matthew Ronay is an American artist who lives and works in New York. Born in 1976 in Louisville, Kentucky, Ronay studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art, before earning his Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 2000.
Vaughn Spann is a contemporary artist born in Florida in 1992. His style moves between abstraction and figuration, and at times incorporates symbols such as the American flag or the letter X.
Adam Putnam is an American visual artist working primarily with photography, drawing, and performance art. Putnam is a Visiting Associate Professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.