Gary Simmons | I Wish, 2003

Since the 1990s, Gary Simmons has been creating an increasingly-nuanced body of work that considers race and class through chalkboard drawings and paintings; and multimedia installation and sculpture, regularly hovering between representation and abstraction. 

 

He often mines imagery and words from pop culture, most notably from a vast array of stereotypical racist cartoons of the 20th century. In other works, he renders architecture that employs both systems of surveillance as well as sites of play and hope, like sports stadiums, boxing rings, and ballrooms. He is known for his practice of sketching and then physically erasing or smudging fragments of chalkboard or slate paint, leaving muted impressions which imbue a ghostly quality connected to both personal and collective memory. I Wish (2003) belongs to a continuing period of interest in the motif of smoke and stars which he associates with wishing, dreaming, and longing.

 

Simmons was born in New York in 1964 and received his BFA at the School of Visual Arts. Then, spurred on by his conceptualist leanings, he moved to Los Angeles to attend CalArts where he earned an MFA in 1990. His early work primarily took the form of sculpture, but after taking a studio in a decommissioned school in New York, he came across chalkboards in storage which would become the impetus for his Erasure drawings. The chalkboard led him to experiment with blackboard paint, to which he would use gloves to blur or drag the drawings or text on the surface. Over the course of his career, this practice has expanded to large-scale and ephemeral wall drawings which respond to the site, as well as public works that incorporate performance. Simmons participated in the 1997 edition of INSITE with a performance and film documenting snowflake shapes drawn in the sky from a plane over the Anza Borrego desert, with a film projected in the baggage room of San Diego’s Santa Fe Train Depot. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including a 2023 comprehensive survey of his work, ‘Gary Simmons: Public Enemy,’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Simmons lives and works in Los Angeles.