Aspen Art Museum

With cited inspiration from nearly every corner of American popular culture, Gary Simmons draws on our collective experience and memory of race and class in America to create thought-provoking works in a range of media including sculpture, painting, drawings on slate, and ready-made objects that uniquely address our present moment.

Simmons was born in 1964 in New York and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. The artist received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1988 and his MFA from CalArts in 1990. The artist has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Perez Art Museum, Miami; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Modern Art of Fort Worth; Bohen Foundation, New York; St. Louis Art Museum; Kunsthaus Zürich; Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles; and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

His work was included in the influential exhibition Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art at the Whitney Museum, New York, in 1994. He has also been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Menil Collection, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Simmons additionally participated in the 2020 Lahore Biennale, the 56th Venice Biennale, Sharjah Biennial 12, and Prospect 3, New Orleans.