Laurie Simmons

We are pleased to present Laurie Simmons: Walking Objects, Legs & Shoes, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition brings together photographs from three series: Walking Objects (1987–91) and — shown for the first time — Legs & Shoes (1996) and The Vogue Pictures (2005).

Walking Objects is among the most formally inventive bodies of work in American photography, and the series remains as relevant today as when Simmons first conceived of the work in the late 1980s. Everyday items — a house, a handbag, a microphone — appear alive and larger than life, supported by human legs or plastic doll limbs. These images extend Simmons’ long inquiry in consumer culture as well as gender roles, especially how women are treated as things to be displayed, used, or consumed. Legs & Shoes and The Vogue Pictures deepen these themes.

Simmons’ pictures are witty, and they are also serious. They show “how strong women need to be to meet the demands that society places on them,” Simmons explains, and “the way we almost merge our identities with the things we own.”

Laurie Simmons (b. 1949) is a photographer and filmmaker. She grew up on Long Island and in the 1970s emerged as a central figure of the Pictures Generation. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1997) and the Brooklyn Museum’s Women in the Arts Award (2013), and her feature film My Art premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017. Simmons has had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Walker Art Center, Baltimore Museum of Art, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan, MoMA, the Whitney, Guggenheim Museum, MOCA Los Angeles, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. She lives and works in New York and Connecticut.