Gary Simmons

Gary Simmons was born in New York City in 1964. He received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1988 and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1990. After his tenure at Cal Arts, Simmons returned to New York and set up his studio in a former school building, where he found himself clearing away blackboards to make space for his sculptures. Soon after, Simmons began his first series of chalk drawings on blackboards, focusing on the development of racial, class and cultural identities in educational settings. This work paved the way for Simmons’s signature “erasure” technique, in which he smudges his chalk drawing with his hands or body, rendering their imagery ghostly and uncertain. While Simmons is widely known for the erasure drawings, he has often defined himself as a sculptor and has consistently worked across media, ranging from wall drawings and sky writing to found objects and fiberglass.

Over the course of a career spanning more than two decades, Simmons has built this arsenal into a powerful and profound visual vocabulary, leveraging the potency of familiar images as well as drawing from imagined spaces. A recent body of work draws on a lifelong passion for sports, incorporating drawings of 1930s posters for the historic boxing matches between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling. These and other works are featured in the comprehensive monograph Gary Simmons: Paradise (Damiani, 2012).

In addition to his 2002–03 solo show, co-organized by the Studio Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Gary Simmons has been featured in Studio Museum exhibitions including The Bearden Project (2012), Collected. Vignettes (2011), 30 Seconds Off an Inch (2009–10), and Collection in Context (2008). His work has been widely exhibited around the world, including in one-person exhibitions at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; The Bohen Foundation, New York; and The Philadelphia Museum of Art. His work is in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Studio Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others. Simmons’s commitment to creating work in public space is evidenced in two major commissions, Reflection of a Future Past (Black) (2009) for the New York Presbyterian Hospital and Blue Field Explosions (2009) for the Dallas Cowboys Stadium.

In 2021 Gary is now represented worldwide by the prestigious Hauser and Wirth Gallery