Themes

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Race films

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Object spotlight balcony seating only

Object Spotlight: Balcony Seating Only

Published On

August 16 2022

Gary Simmons’ Balcony Seating Only, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth

Gary Simmons’ (b. 1964) sculpture is inspired by a historical photograph of the exterior of a segregated theater in Anniston, Alabama. It serves as a reminder of the separate spaces African Americans were forced to inhabit, both as viewers and as filmmakers. In what he calls his “erasure” paintings, Simmons smudges racially-charged words, images, and symbols. In this piece, “colored” appears ghostlike yet still legible, suggesting a delicate tension between past and present.

Exterior of a segregated theater in Anniston, Alabama

Simmons is an American artist from New York City whose work addresses personal and collective experiences of race and class using icons and stereotypes of American popular culture. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1988, and his MFA from CalArts in 1990, studying under Charles Gaines, Michael Asher, and Catherine Lord, among others. After graduating, he established a studio in New York City, where he predominantly worked in sculpture. Once a vocational school, that first studio space contained leftover, rolling blackboards and Simmons soon began to experiment with his “erasure” technique on them, applying white chalk on slate-painted panels or walls and smearing and smudging the chalk marks by hand. He explains: “I started to think about how images on blackboards can never be fully erased. It was about trying to erase a stereotype and the traces of the racial pain that you drag along with you.” 

Simmons's paintings, drawings, and sculptures have been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; SITE Santa Fe; The Studio Museum in Harlem; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich. 

Simmons currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Gary Simmons Balcony Seating Only, 2017 Oil paint on aluminum, steel Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth

Learn more:

https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/33677-gary-simmons/

https://caamuseum.org/exhibitions/2017/gary-simmons-fade-to-black

https://tamarind.unm.edu/artist/gary-simmons/