Laurie Simmons

*1949

 

Laurie Simmons was born in 1949 in Far Rockaway, Queens, and grew up in Great Neck, Long Island. Her childhood, shaped by American suburban postwar culture, remained a decisive starting point for her photographic oeuvre, which condenses broad themes such as social conventions, gender identities, and consumer culture into miniature worlds made of toys.

Simmons studied at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, where she was trained primarily in the classical disciplines of painting and sculpture. After completing her BFA, she briefly lived in a feminist commune in upstate New York before moving to New York City in 1973, where her fascination with photography began.

The New York photography scene of the 1970s was shaped by the emerging phenomenon of conceptual photography, which emphasized art’s status as idea rather than as a commodified object. At the same time, photography began to engage more directly with popular culture rather than attempting to conceal its proximity to it. Simmons’s characteristic miniature worlds emerge from this context. For a toy catalogue, she photographed bathroom fixtures and other dollhouse furniture—objects she had already begun collecting during her studies. The proximity of these objects to the suburban culture of her childhood inspired Simmons’s first miniature photographs, which, set within densely arranged dollhouses, evoke the confinement of 1950s housewives.

With this focus on the conceptual dimension of photography, Laurie Simmons is counted among artists such as Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Sherrie Levine within the Pictures Generation, known for its interest in the role of the image in an increasingly media-saturated world. However, her works, which lend a melancholic undertone to the cheerful sheen of toys, do not always share the often cool, media-theoretical visual language of her contemporaries. A taste for narrative and animated worlds is evident in Simmons’s film The Music of Regret, which stars Meryl Streep in a lively world of dolls.

Simmons’s works are represented in major international art collections. Her career was shaped by early exhibitions at venues such as MoMA PS1, participation in the Whitney Biennial, as well as later retrospectives at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.