Gary Simmons

SITE SANTA FE PRESENTS A SURVEY OF WORKS BY GARY SIMMONS June 22 - September 8, 2002 MEDIA PREVIEW Friday, June 21, 10am Santa Fe, NM - SITE Santa Fe presents GARY SIMMONS, the most extensive museum exhibition of Simmons's work to date. Co-organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, the exhibition will be on view at SITE Santa Fe June 22 - September 8, 2002, with a free public opening reception Friday, June 21, 6-7 pm. There will be a gallery talk with the artist at 5 pm on June 22. Curated by Thelma Golden of the Studio Museum in Harlem, GARY SIMMONS surveys the artist's work of the past seven years, and presents approximately 35 drawings, photographs, sculptures, and videos. Gary Simmons will also include two major new works made especially for the traveling exhibition - a sculpture and a large-scale site-specific wall drawing. With extreme insight into subjects that address racial stereotypes in history and pop culture, Simmons creates extraordinary works with simple materials. Simmons is best known for his magnificent, expansive erasure drawings, which are executed in white chalk on slate-painted panels or walls, then smeared and smudged by the artist's hands. Simmons's earliest works presented blatant racially stereotypical images that he appropriated from popular visual culture. In recent works he uses imagery that carries multiple suggestions of meaning, but that continues to address personal and collective experiences of race and class. The act of erasure plays a central role in Simmons's work as a gesture of protest or critique. He does not attempt to completely eradicate his drawn images, but leaves their traces as signifiers of remembrance and persistence. Simmons worked with SITE Santa Fe as an artist-in-residence in May 2001, when he created Ghost House, a cycle of drawings executed on the reconditioned walls of an uninhabited farmhouse situated on the 25,000-acre Ruby Ranch outside of Las Vegas, New Mexico. Ghost House has been photographed and is the subject of a forthcoming catalogue published by Santa Fe. The full-color, 63 page catalogue with an essay by Avery Gordon, associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, will be for sale at SITE Santa Fe for $25. There will be an opportunity for the public to view Ghost House on Sunday, June 30. All participants must use SITE Santa Fe-provided transportation. Please call 505.989.1199 for ticket prices and more information. Gary Simmons was born in New York in 1964. He attended the School of Visual Arts, New York City (BFA 1988), and The California Institute of Fine Arts, Valencia, California (MFA 1990). His work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, including those at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles, California; Kunsthaus, ZŸrich, Switzerland; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gary Simmons exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Studio Museum in Harlem. The catalogue is the first monograph on Simmons's work, featuring essays by Thelma Golden, Maurice Berger, and an interview with Franklin Sirmans and Gary Simmons, which is available at SITE Santa Fe for $25. GARY SIMMONS was co-organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. This exhibition is generously supported by The Joyce Foundation, Elizabeth Morse Genius Charitable Trust, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Sara Albrecht Nygren, and Nancy and Sanfred Koltun. The exhibition was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago February 16 – May 19, 2002, and will travel to the Studio Museum in Harlem October 2, 2002 – January 5, 2003. Additional funding for the SITE Santa Fe presentation of GARY SIMMONS is provided by Lannan Foundation. Concurrently with GARY SIMMONS, SITE Santa Fe presents John F. Simon, Jr., a survey of two- and three-dimensional digital art works, and Sarah Morris: Capital, a DVD installation in the Projection Room. SITE Santa Fe is located at 1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Exhibition hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 pm; Friday, 10:00 am - 7:00 pm. Admission is $5.00 for adults and $2.50 for students, and seniors; members are free. Free admission is offered on Fridays, made possible by a grant from The Brown Foundation, Inc., Houston. Free guided tours are offered on Fridays at 6:00 pm and Saturdays and Sundays at 2:00 pm. Tours in Spanish are by appointment. SITE Santa Fe gift certificates are available. Call 505.989.1199 for more information. This press release is partially funded by the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers' Tax. VISUALS AVAILABLE Contact: Press Office Tel: 505.989.1199 Fax:505.989.1188 email: press@sitesantafe.org

When you Wish, 1996 Green chalk, chalk, paint on panel 24 x 24 inches Collection of Mark Lerner, New York