Xaviera Simmons

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Xaviera Simmons XAVIERA SIMMONS’S body of work spans photography, performance, video, sound, sculpture and installation. She defines her studio practice, which is rooted in an ongoing investigation of experience, memory, abstraction, present and future histories-specifically shifting notions surrounding landscape, character development and formal processes, as cyclical rather than linear. In other words, Simmons is committed equally to the examination of different artistic modes and processes; for example, she may dedicate part of a year to photography, another part to performance, and other parts to installation, video, and sound works-keeping her practice in constant and consistent rotation, shift, and engagement. Simmons received her BFA from Bard College (2004) after spending two years on a walking pilgrimage retracing the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade with Buddhist Monks. She completed the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art (2005) while simultaneously completing a two-year actor-training conservatory with The Maggie Flanigan Studio. Simmons has exhibited nationally and internationally where major exhibitions and performances include: The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, The Studio Museum In Harlem, The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Public Art Fund, The Sculpture Center, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; David Castillo Gallery and The Savannah College Of Art and Design among many others. Selected upcoming solo and group exhibitions for 2015 include: Accumulations, Light Work Syracuse, Foto, Annin Arts, London, Number 16, Kemper Museum Of Art, Kansas City, Radical Presence, Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, San Francisco, Where Do We Migrate To, Vamlands Museum, Sweden and When The Stars Begin To Fall, ICA Boston. Simmons is the recipient of significant and numerous awards including a 2015 Recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award for Visual Art. .

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The Kitchen Center for Video, Music, Dance, Performance, Film, and Literature
The Kitchen Center for video, music, dance, performance, film, and literature Fall 2016 Season Upcoming Fall 2016 Upcoming Winter 2017 The Kitchen presents Sondra Perry: Resident Evil Philippe Quesne: La Mélancolie des November 2–December 10. dragons In 1971, Sun Ra said “Black people need a January 10–14, 8PM. $25. mythocracy, not a democracy because they’ll A band of longhaired metalheads decide that the never make it in history.…Truth is not snowy forest where their hatchback has stalled permissible for me to use because I’m not might be the perfect location to build a new righteous and holy, I’m evil, that’s because I’m heavy metal-themed amusement park. A help- black and I’m not subscribed to any types of ful stranger is invited into their world of classic righteousness.” Perry’s new video examines this rock, medieval recorders, and large inflatable active disinterest in the respectability that sculptures. An international audience favorite, blackness has been perpetually asked to earn by this three-dimensional poem is full of visual white culture. Using the lens of the Alien movie wonder, joy and melancholy, and sincere delight franchise—one which has been providing in human existence. Presented by The Kitchen allegories of colonialism and mutability for as part of The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Xaviera Simmons: CODED decades—Perry’s work asks: how do agents of Festival. power behave when their subjects become absolutely unpredictable, fluidly inhabiting Raúl De Nieves and Colin Self: The Fool societal norms in order to destroy them? Curated February 9–11, 8PM.
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Xaviera Simmons '05 Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters
Xaviera Simmons '05 Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters Xaviera Simmons’s sweeping body of work centers around photography and includes performance, choreography, video, sound, sculpture, and installation. Her interdisciplinary practice is rooted in shifting definitions of landscape; character development; art, political, and social histories; and the interconnectedness of formal processes. Simmons received her bachelor’s degree from Bard College after spending two years on a walking pilgrimage with Buddhist monks retracing the transatlantic slave trade. She completed the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art while simultaneously completing a two-year actor training with the Maggie Flanigan Studio. Simmons received Agnes Gund’s Art for Justice Award and Denniston Hills’ Distinguished Performance Artist Award, both in 2018. Her work is part of numerous upcoming exhibitions and projects including Sundown at David Castillo Gallery, Miami; The Restless Earth, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2019); and Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places Commission (2018–19), among many others. Recent solo exhibitions include Convene at Sculpture Center, New York; Overlay at Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; and The Gold Miner’s Mission to Dwell on the Tide Line, at Modern Window, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Current and recent museum group exhibitions include The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina; MassArt, Boston; Renaissance Society, Chicago; Seattle Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Prospect.4, New Orleans; Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan; Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Cincinnati Art Museum; and Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco.
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Xaviera Simmons at Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro - Burnaway
6/14/2021 Don’t Forget: Xaviera Simmons at Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro - Burnaway Don’t Forget: Xaviera Simmons at Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro BY SUSAN LEE MACKEY MARCH 11, 2021 https://burnaway.org/daily/dont-forget-xaviera-simmons-at-weatherspoon-art-museum-greensboro/ 1/9 6/14/2021 Don’t Forget: Xaviera Simmons at Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro - Burnaway Xaviera Simmons, Index Two, Composition Three, 2012; Chromogenic color print, 50 x 40 inches. Edition of 3. Courtesy of the artist and David Castillo, Miami. © Xaviera Simmons n view at the Weatherspoon Art Museum is a small exhibition of photographs by Xaviera Simmons, currently the Falk Visiting Artist at UNC Greensboro. https://burnawayO.org/daily/dont-forget-xaviera-simmons-at-weatherspoon-art-museum-greensboro/ 2/9 6/14/2021 Don’t Forget: Xaviera Simmons at Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro - Burnaway Simmons’ artistic works spans multiple genres, and she sees herself as “archivist, image maker, producer, director and sometimes actor.” But her work is not delineated by genres, rather, each O project is part of an ongoing exploration of ideas: abolition, reparations, undoing whiteness, and, especially in this exhibition, archival research. The photographs in this exhibition were made over the course of ten years. Included are six images from her Index series, 2 from her Sundown series, and 1 landscape self-portrait. The Sundown series is named after “sundown towns,” areas in which Black folks and other people of color faced heightened violence after dark. In each Sundown image, Simmons photographs herself holding an archival image for her viewer to confront while she looks elsewhere.
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ICA at VCU Presents Major New Exhibition Exploring Representations of Race in Contemporary Art
ICA at VCU Presents Major New Exhibition Exploring Representations of Race in Contemporary Art Great Force Features Works and Performances by 24 Artists Including New Commissions by Tomashi Jackson, Charlotte Lagarde, and Xaviera Simmons Richmond, VA – October 5, 2019 - The Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) presents Great Force, an exhibition that uses painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance to explore how art can be used to envision new forms of race and representation freed from the bounds of historic racial constructs. The exhibition features new commissions and recent work by an intergenerational group of 24 established and emerging artists, including Pope.L, Sable Elyse Smith, Xaviera Simmons, Charlotte Lagarde, and Tomashi Jackson. Borrowing its title from a quote by novelist and social critic James Baldwin, “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do,” Great Force explores how contemporary artists contend with persistent black-white racial bias and inequality in the U.S. The exhibition is curated by ICA Associate Curator Amber Esseiva, an alumna of VCUarts. Great Force is on view at the ICA at VCU from October 5, 2019, through January 5, 2020. For the duration of Great Force, the ICA will convene community discussions about race, representations of the oppressed and the empowered, and how art can become a tool in pursuit of visibility. The exhibition will extend out of the ICA’s galleries to include films, performances, and public discussions which will all serve as catalysts for discussions about race and culture today.
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The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Goethe-Institut New York
MEDIA RELEASE The Studio Museum in Harlem 144 West 125th Street New York, NY 10027 studiomuseum.org/press Contact: Liz Gwinn, Public Relations and Publications Manager [email protected] 646.214.2142 Opening Reception and Press Preview: 6–8 pm, Friday, September 24, 2010 RSVP: [email protected] 212.864.4500 x255 The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Goethe-Institut New York Announce OFF/SITE Pioneering year-long collaboration begins September 24 with Xaviera Simmons: junctures (transmissions to) Xaviera Simmons in studio, 2009, Image courtesy Chris Sanders NEW YORK, September 10, 2010 —The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Goethe-Institut New York are joining forces for an innovative one-year collaboration: OFF/SITE. This unique partnership between two culturally specific institutions features artist projects and public programs in two iconic New York City neighborhoods, Harlem and the East Village. OFF/SITE synthesizes the missions, histories and mandates of both institutions. The Studio Museum and the Goethe-Institut New York share a commitment to specific places, cultures and experiences as well as to global engagement with contemporary art and ideas. They are uniquely suited to co-present a series of exhibitions, perfor- mances, panels and screenings that interrogates concepts including geography, site-responsiveness, community and artistic practice. Xaviera Simmons: junctures (transmissions to), OFF/SITE’s inaugural project, will be on view at the Goethe-Insti- tut Wyoming Building from September 24 to October 27, 2010. A public program featuring Simmons and junctures (transmissions to) collaborators will take place at the Studio Museum at 7 pm on Thursday, October 21.
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Landscapes of Desire How Music Keeps Xaviera Simmonsʹs Art In
Landscapes of Desire How Music keeps Xaviera Simmonsʹs Art in the flow She is a modern Renaissance woman: In her work, Xaviera Simmons combines every conceivable kind of art form. But the main influences on her have been music, a fascination with landscape, and travel. Jessica Loudis met her for a drink. I meet Xaviera Simmons at a bar in Williamsburg on an unseasonably warm evening at the start of fall. We had planned to get together at her studio in Manhattan, but in the interest of taking a “more fluid” approach to her practice, Simmons is spending less and less time at the studio, and wants to be there only when necessary. She’s tall, with short hair and a kind of casual confidence that suggests she’s not afraid of unfamiliar situations. She’s also perceptive and gracious— she compliments our waiter on his shirt, and at various moments throughout our conversation she checks in to make sure my microphone is working. In lieu of being in the city these days, the artist tells me that she prefers working upstate, where she lives for much of the week, or in dance studios, which she has been frequenting in preparation for an upcoming show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The show is on her mind tonight, and Simmons said she’d been thinking a lot about contemporary dance, Jamaican “daggering,” and particularly the work of Yvonne Rainer and experimental Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. She’d also been immersed in what she described as “male homoerotic imagery,” namely Tom Bianchi’s softcore Polaroids of the sculpted men of Fire Island, and the haunting portraits of Alvin Baltrop, a black photographer who captured the clandestine gay Xaviera Simmons.
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Xaviera Simmons: CODED June 22 – July 29
Xaviera Simmons: CODED June 22 – July 29 Opening reception: Wednesday, June 22 from 6 – 8pm. The Kitchen is pleased to present CODED, an exhibition of works by Xaviera Simmons featuring new and recent photographic, audio, text-based sculptural work and ultimately a movement-based performance. Her dynamic interdisciplinary approach to art-making is rooted in an ongoing investigation of experience, memory, and present and future histories, specifically focusing on shifting notions surrounding landscape and character, as well as conversations between formal processes. With CODED, Simmons continues to mine art historical sources, Internet media, and archival images, in this case as they relate to queer history, homoerotic imagery as well as Jamaican dancehall culture, to construct a new, cohesive conceptual territory. Simmons’ particular vocabulary of movement, reference, sense, text, breath, sound, and image offers ways of looking at sexuality, gender, pleasure, and sensuality in a queer context and in an island context. The exhibition is the foundation for a unique choreographic score for the forthcoming performance work. Through the sensual, through movement, her works push towards a committed practice of visual freedom. This project is curated by Matthew Lyons. Xaviera Simmons is a critically acclaimed artist whose body of work spans photography, performance, video, sound, sculpture and installation. Simmons is committed equally to the examination of different artistic modes and processes where, for example, she may dedicate part of a year to photography, another part to performance, and other parts to installation, video, and sound works-keeping her practice in constant and consistent rotation, shift, and engagement. Xaviera Simmons’ CODED is on view June 22 – July 29 at The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street).
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Public Art Works
Public Art Works SEASON 1 - EPISODE #3 PUBLIC ART/PUBLIC ACTION Xaviera Simmons & Kate Gilmore, moderated by Paola Mendoza TRT 35:01 JEFFREY WRIGHT: Hi. I’m your host, Jeffrey Wright. And welcome back to the Public Art Fund podcast, Public Art Works. On today’s episode, we want to start by thinking about the intersection between public art and public action. JEFFREY WRIGHT: These can be very different things with very different intents. Public art isn’t by definition political. And public action isn’t by definition, well, art. But there are ways in which artists working in the public sphere can blur these lines—and blur them productively, we think, especially with so many of us here in the United States and in New York City specifically thinking more about public action. Thinking more about the roles our voices and our bodies can play in public space when it comes to speaking up for what we believe is just and right. JEFFREY WRIGHT: According to a 2018 poll conducted by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation, one in five Americans have participated in a public protest and/or political gathering since January 2016. And nearly one in five of those participants had never done so before. New Yorkers are, of course, no exception. PUBLIC VOICE 1: I went to the March for our Lives last year, PUBLIC VOICE 2: I participated in the Women’s March. PUBLIC VOICE 3: The Women’s March, a couple of times. PUBLIC VOICE 4: Last weekend I participated at a march with the Laundromat Workers Association.
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2014 Atlanta Artadia Awardees
Subscribe Share Past Issues Translate View this email in your browser The 2014 Artadia Atlanta Award Winners JURORS Michael Rooks, Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Caption: Robbie Land, Matters of Bioluminescence, 2013, 16mm, 7 Georgia minutes. Courtesy the artist. New York, NY- Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue is pleased to announce the 2014 Artadia Atlanta Award winners. The recipient of the 2014 Artadia Atlanta Award at the $20,000 Carter Foster, Curator of Drawings, The Whitney level is Robbie Land. Paul Stephen Benjamin, Museum of American Art, Bethany Collins and Lauri Stallings will receive New York, New York Artadia Awards at the $8,000 level. Artadia awards artists of outstanding merit with substantial, unrestricted funds and connects them to a network of opportunities. For more information about the artists and their work, please see descriptions below. Applications for the Artadia Atlanta Awards were open to visual artists working in all mediums at any stage of their career currently living in Atlanta's 23-county area. The application was accessible online for three months (December 15, 2013 - March 23, 2014). In March 2014, three jurors—Michael Rooks, Curator, The High Museum, Atlanta; Carter Foster, Curator of Drawings, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Christopher Y. Lew, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1, New York—selected ten Christopher Lew, Assistant finalists from over 241 applications submitted Curator, MoMA PS1, New by Atlanta's talented visual artists. The ten York, New York finalists were: Paul Stephen Benjamin, Sheila Pree Bright, Bethany Collins, Ruth Dusseault, Jody Fausett, Robbie Land, Pam Longobardi, Tommy Nease, Lauri Stallings and P.
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Artists Challenge Representation in Socrates Sculpture Park for MONUMENTS NOW by KATE MAZADE • February 28, 2020
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2013 Regional Artist Grant Awards.Pdf
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THE BASS MUSEUM of ART 2100 Collins Avenue Miami Beach, FL 33139
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