Gary Simmons: Ghost Reels

Mining the iconography of American popular culture, Gary Simmons’s work addresses personal and collective experiences of race and class. He is best known for his “erasure drawings,” which he began working on in the late 1980s in an abandoned school in New York City that contained an abundance of blackboards. Using white chalk on slate-painted panels or walls, Simmons blurred the drawings with his hands resulting in hazy but persistent images that evoke faded memories or classrooms at the end of the school day. For The Drawing Center, Simmons created a text-based work consisting of names of African American actors and actresses from the early days of silent film. The artist describes the installation, whose format recalls the scrolling of closing film credits frozen in mid-motion, as invoking “the memories of actors that have been blurred in the history of Hollywood film . . . a kind of silence in both voice and visibility.”

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Whether or not you go, Gary Simmons is the artist's first catalogue, and focuses on work produced since the mid-1990s. From his child-sized Klan robes and rows of empty gilded sneakers to his recent photographs of uninhabited pedagogical spaces, Gary Simmons's work contains and invokes an absence as palpable and fraught with meaning as any presence. His best known work, expansive erasure drawings containing imagery addressing issues pertaining to race, pedagogy and culture, are sketched on blackboards and walls and then rubbed and smudged by the artist's own hands. A widely acclaimed young artist who came to prominence in the late 80s, Simmons's work in drawing and sculpture deals extensively with black identity and with imagery inspired by American popular culture, from cartoons to vernacular architecture. 

Gary Simmons