Laurie Simmons
Characters from The Movie/Nurses

Reverse-printed on quarter-inch plexiglass, Characters from The Movie/Nurses is as much stand-alone object as image. It represents a unique, new medium for the artist and was exclusively produced in collaboration with Chroma Center for Art for Black Lives.  The work, incorporating multi-racial nurse figurines, whose blithe expressions and upturned hands call into question cultural expectations of essential workers, responds directly to our current pandemic moment.

Laurie Simmons (b. 1949, Long Island, NY) is a Connecticut-based artist and filmmaker. Working with dolls, figurines, dummies and sometimes people, Simmons stages uncanny scenes to question expectations of gender and culture. Recent series How We See and Some New use portraiture with body paint on human models to examine identity and persona in the age of social media.  In a previous series, Walking Objects, small-scale props join doll legs and walk, run or dance through dramatic stage lighting. It is a surrealist strategy that critiques domestic tropes. Simmons is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and the National Endowment of the Arts. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Her feature-length narrative film, My Art, premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in 2016.