Gary Simmons
dal 20/6/2002 al 8/9/2002
Segnalato da
20/6/2002
Gary Simmons
SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe
Gary Simmons surveys the artist's work of the past seven years, and presents approximately 35 drawings, photographs, sculptures, and videos. Gary Simmons will also include two major new works made especially for the traveling exhibition - a sculpture and a large-scale site-specific wall drawing.
Santa Fe, NM - SITE Santa Fe presents GARY
SIMMONS, the most extensive museum
exhibition of Simmons's work to date.
Co-organized by the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Chicago, and the Studio Museum in Harlem,
the exhibition will be on view at SITE Santa Fe
June 22 - September 8, 2002.
Curated by Thelma Golden of the Studio
Museum in Harlem, GARY SIMMONS surveys
the artist's work of the past seven years, and
presents approximately 35 drawings,
photographs, sculptures, and videos. Gary
Simmons will also include two major new works
made especially for the traveling exhibition - a
sculpture and a large-scale site-specific wall
drawing.
With extreme insight into subjects that address
racial stereotypes in history and pop culture,
Simmons creates extraordinary works with
simple materials. Simmons is best known for his
magnificent, expansive erasure drawings, which
are executed in white chalk on slate-painted
panels or walls, then smeared and smudged by
the artist's hands. Simmons's earliest works
presented blatant racially stereotypical images
that he appropriated from popular visual culture.
In recent works he uses imagery that carries
multiple suggestions of meaning, but that
continues to address personal and collective
experiences of race and class. The act of
erasure plays a central role in Simmons's work
as a gesture of protest or critique. He does not
attempt to completely eradicate his drawn
images, but leaves their traces as signifiers of
remembrance and persistence.
Simmons worked with SITE Santa Fe as an
artist-in-residence in May 2001, when he
created Ghost House, a cycle of drawings
executed on the reconditioned walls of an
uninhabited farmhouse situated on the
25,000-acre Ruby Ranch outside of Las Vegas,
New Mexico. Ghost House has been
photographed and is the subject of a
forthcoming catalogue published by Santa Fe.
The full-color, 63 page catalogue with an essay
by Avery Gordon, associate professor of
sociology at the University of California at Santa
Barbara, will be for sale at SITE Santa Fe for
$25. There will be an opportunity for the public to
view Ghost House on Sunday, June 30. All
participants must use SITE Santa Fe-provided
transportation. Please call 505.989.1199 for
ticket prices and more information.
Gary Simmons was born in New York in 1964.
He attended the School of Visual Arts, New York
City (BFA 1988), and The California Institute of
Fine Arts, Valencia, California (MFA 1990). His
work has been the subject of numerous solo and
group exhibitions, including those at the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC;
Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles, California;
Kunsthaus, Zürich, Switzerland; The Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York; and the
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Free public
opening reception Friday, June 21, 6-7 pm.
MEDIA PREVIEW
Friday, June 21, 10am
There will be a gallery talk with the artist at 5 pm
on June 22.
The Gary Simmons exhibition is accompanied
by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and
the Studio Museum in Harlem. The catalogue is
the first monograph on Simmons's work,
featuring essays by Thelma Golden, Maurice
Berger, and an interview with Franklin Sirmans
and Gary Simmons, which is available at SITE
Santa Fe for $25.
GARY SIMMONS was co-organized by the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and The
Studio Museum in Harlem. This exhibition is
generously supported by The Joyce Foundation,
Elizabeth Morse Genius Charitable Trust, The
Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The
Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Sara Albrecht
Nygren, and Nancy and Sanfred Koltun. The
exhibition was presented at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago February 16 Â May
19, 2002, and will travel to the Studio Museum in
Harlem October 2, 2002 Â January 5, 2003.
Additional funding for the SITE Santa Fe
presentation of GARY SIMMONS is provided
by Lannan Foundation.
Concurrently with GARY SIMMONS, SITE
Santa Fe presents John F. Simon, Jr., a survey
of two- and three-dimensional digital art works,
and Sarah Morris: Capital, a DVD installation in
the Projection Room.
SITE Santa Fe is located at 1606 Paseo de
Peralta, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Exhibition hours
are Wednesday through Sunday, 10:00 a.m. -
5:00 pm; Friday, 10:00 am - 7:00 pm.
Admission is $5.00 for adults and $2.50 for
students, and seniors; members are free.
Free
admission is offered on Fridays, made possible
by a grant from The Brown Foundation, Inc.,
Houston.
Free guided tours are offered on
Fridays at 6:00 pm and Saturdays and Sundays
at 2:00 pm.
Tours in Spanish are by
appointment.
SITE Santa Fe gift certificates are
available.
Call 505.989.1199 for more
information.
Image: Gary Simmons, When you Wish, 1996 Green chalk, chalk, paint on panel 24 x 24 inches
Collection of Mark Lerner, New York
SITE Santa Fe
1606 Paseo de Peralta
Santa Fe, NM
tel 505-989-1199