Simmons, Laurie

American, b. 1949 Long Island, NY

BiographyLaurie Simmons’s vast artistic output as a filmmaker and photographer centers around staged scenes of domesticity where she transforms the shiny plasticity of consumerism into surreal images that often feature dolls, dollhouses, and puppets. Through these constructed scenarios, Simmons explores her existential concerns of reality versus illusion to challenge traditional models of Western gender roles. The Music of Regret (Meryl, Act 2, Rain) is a still from a three- act mini-musical starring Meryl Streep, Adam Guettel, and dancers from the Alvin Ailey II American Dance Theater. In the scene, Streep performs a duet with a puppet during a fabricated storm. She and the puppet sing a melodic, haunting tune together and wait for the storm to pass, capturing an uncanny convergence of authenticity and artificiality. This film was Simmons’s directorial debut.

The Music of Regret (Meryl, Act 2, Rain) is one of thirteen prints featured in the portfolio America: Now and Here, which was produced in 2009 in conjunction with a traveling exhibition of the same name. Both seek to expand a dialogue about American identity post-9/11. The portfolio’s introductory essay, A Calamity of Heart, was written by E.L. Doctorow and commissioned by curator Eric Fischl to serve as an introduction to the collected works. Their intention, stated Doctorow, is to serve as “the ground song for our time of a diverse, still vibrantly alive society.” Doctorow’s prose is a call to action in restoring the celebration of expressive freedom.

Other artists in the portfolio include: Ross Bleckner, Chuck Close, Ralph Gibson, April Gornik, Sally Mann, Vik Muniz, Lou Reed, Andres Serrano, and Bill Viola.

Laurie Simmons was born in Long Island, NY. She received a BFA from Tyler School of Art (1971). Upon returning to New York, her depictions of feminine, suburban superficiality placed her at the forefront of a generation of predominantly women artists who used photography to shift the dialogue in contemporary art towards feminism, commodification, and mass-production. Simmons is considered, alongside artists like Barbara Kruger, David Salle, and Sherrie Levine, as a seminal figure of The Pictures Generation—a loose collective of artists whose work criticized pop culture and mass media. She was featured in The Pictures Generation, 1974 — 1984 exhibition at Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009.

Simmons was a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1984 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997. Her diverse body of work includes fashion (including collaborations with designers Thakoon Panichgul in 2008 and Peter Jensen in 2009) and two additional films—Tiny Furniture (2010) and My Art (2016). In 2018-2019 her retrospective, Big Camera/Little Camera, was shown at the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth TX, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL. Simmons’s work is part of permanent collections across the world, including: Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Hara Museum, Tokyo; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and others.