Aspen Art Museum

Registration Required
Free and open to the public

Join ArtCrush 2022 Honoree Gary Simmons for a discussion with writer and editor Travis Diehl. The speakers will discuss Simmons’s sources and materials, from classrooms and cartoons as venues for cultural memory, to the formalism of racism in the United States. The pair will delve into Simmons’s evolution as an artist, expanding on his multifaceted practice that renders “history’s hard lines as porous, transitory, and futureward.”

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Biography

With cited inspiration from nearly every corner of American popular culture, Gary Simmons draws on our collective experience and memory of race and class in America to create thought-provoking works in a range of media including sculpture, painting, drawings on slate, and ready-made objects that uniquely address our present moment.

Simmons was born in 1964 in New York and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. The artist received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1988 and his MFA from CalArts in 1990. The artist has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Perez Art Museum, Miami; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Modern Art of Fort Worth; Bohen Foundation, New York; St. Louis Art Museum; Kunsthaus Zürich; Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles; and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

Travis Diehl is a freelance critic, writer, and online editor at X-TRA. His work appears in The Baffler, Art in America, Frieze, Artforum, art-agenda, e-flux journal, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New York Times, among others. He is a recipient of the Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant and the Rabkin Prize in Visual Arts Journalism.