NEW YORK: Xaviera Simmons

CODED

June 22 - July 29, 2016

THE KITCHEN  

512 West 19th Street

New York, NY

From thekitchen.org:

The Kitchen is pleased to present CODED, an exhibition of works by Xaviera Simmons featuring new and recent photographic, audio, video, text-based sculptural work and ultimately a movement-based performance. Her dynamic, interdisciplinary approach to art-making is rooted in an ongoing investigation of experience, memory, and present and future histories, specifically focusing on shifting notions surrounding landscape and character, as well as conversations between formal processes.

With CODED, Simmons continues to mine art historical sources, Internet media, and archival images, in this case as they relate to queer history, homoerotic imagery as well as Jamaican dancehall culture, to construct a new, cohesive conceptual territory. Simmons’ particular vocabulary of movement, reference, sense, text, breath, sound, and image offers ways of looking at mapping, sexuality, gender, pleasure, and sensuality in a queer context and in an island context. The exhibition is the foundation for a unique choreographic score for the forthcoming performance work. Through the sensual, through movement, her works push towards a committed practice of visual freedom.

Exhibit link

ARTIST TALK: Xaviera Simmons / Chicago, IL / March 12, 2014

Xaviera Simmons, Index Four Composition Two, 2013, color photograph, 40 x 50 inches. Image via saic.edu. 

Underscore and Open

Wednesday, March 12, 6:00 PM

THE SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
SAIC Columbus Auditorium

280 South Columbus Drive

Chicago, IL

From the SAIC web site:

Xaviera Simmons's body of work spans photography, performance, video, sound, sculpture and installation. Rooted in an ongoing investigation of experience, memory, abstraction, and present and future histories that specifically shift notions surrounding landscape, her studio practice is defined as cyclical rather than linear. In other words, Simmons is committed equally to the examination of different artistic modes and processes. For example, she may dedicate part of a year to photography, another part to performance, and other parts to installation, video, and sound works—keeping her practice in constant and consistent rotation, shift, and engagement.  

Simmons received a BFA from Bard College after spending two years of walking pilgrimage retracing the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade with Buddhist Monks. She completed the Whitney Museum's ISP in Studio Art (2005) while simultaneously completing a two-year actor-training conservatory with the Maggie Flanigan Studio. Simmons's major exhibitions and performances include the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Museum of Modern Art, New York; New National Museum of Monaco; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and SculptureCenter, New York. Simmons is a recipient of countless awards and fellowships, and her works are in the collections of UBS; Deutsche Bank; Guggenheim Museum, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Studio Museum in Harlem.

Event Link

Xaviera Simmons Interview with Art Pulse Magazine

Living History: Xaviera Simmons and Archive as Impetus, MoMA exhibition, 2013

Radical Presence, Gray Art Gallery & Studio Museum Harlem exhibition, 2013

PANEL DISCUSSION: Looking at the Black Male Nude in Art

In conjunction with the exhibit Jean-Michel Basquiat Reclining Nude:Photographs by Paige Powell

Saturday, February 22, 2014, 6:00PM

SUZANNE GEISS COMPANY

76 Grand Street

New York, NY

PANELISTS:

MICHELA ANGELA DAVIS

ELISE GALLANT

NELSON GEORGE

KALUP LINZY

XAVIERA SIMMONS

RSVP required, contact gallery for details

Phone: 212.625.8130

Email: info@suzannegeiss.com

NEW YORK: Young, Gifted, and Black: Transforming Visual Media

Sondra Perry,  Blue Magic , 2011-2012, Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix, Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix box, flour, milk, eggs, black thread, dried banana peels, craft wire, safety pins, sizes variable

Curated by Shanté Cozier and Dionne Lee 

November 8 - December 15, 2012

THE CAMERA CLUB OF NEW YORK

The Arts Building

336 West 37th Street

New York, NY

Featuring:
Mohau Modisakeng
Terence Nance
Numa Perrier
Sondra Perry 

Xaviera Simmons

Young, Gifted & Black: Transforming Visual Media, guest-curated by Shanté Cozier and Dionne Lee, presents five artists using the mediums of film, video, and photography to propel a shift in the ways that cultural identity is understood. This exhibition, part of CCNY’s Guest Curators Program, brings together a diverse group who counter cultural stereotypes with new forms of identity and self-expression through their work. 

Throughout the history of the black diaspora, the constant creation and delivery of images via the media and pop culture has profoundly shaped the expectations of many. The danger of these images is its lack of diversity and its limited understanding of people of African descent. The breadth and width of the history of the black diaspora is immense, and attempts by the mainstream to categorize it inadvertently and unjustly condense that history. To rectify this, images that act as cultural indicators need be transformed. Working from personal experience, the artists in this exhibition offer powerful, multi-faceted explorations of their own identities. The artists and curators of this exhibition believe it is this broad range of everyday experience and an emphasis on a greater understanding of the self that deserves more public attention, compared to the predictable and misleading stereotypes that so often inundate this society. The multi-media approach, and the active imagery used by the artists in Young, Gifted & Black, echoes the call for a more compelling picture of the multi-faceted, evolving, cultural identity of the African diaspora, propelling forward an understanding of cultural identity beyond the stagnant, singular, and often over-simplified conceptions that have been presented throughout history by pop-culture and mass media. 

Sondra Perry is a multi-media artist working in installation, video, sound, performance and digital imagery. Perry investigates themes of desire, materiality, labor and power, historiography and the performativity of race and gender. Interested in people’s relationships to historical narratives, Perry recalls the past, history’s inherent slippages, and how our nostalgic mutations manifest themselves. The work in this exhibition comes from Black Pieces, four aesthetically and conceptually related videos and still photographs. The Black Pieces are a series of images that try to strip themselves of their technological and historical bindings. 

Terence Nance weaves together a document, animation, and sound, into a formal space elastic enough to accommodate the narrative oddness of real life. Utilizing a tapestry of live action and various styles of animation, Nance explores the fantasies, emotions, and memories that race through his mind exploring a specific time for him when a relationship teetered on the divide between platonic and romantic. 

Numa Perrier is a mixed media artist working in photography, self-portraiture, film, collage, and conceptual installation. Perrier’s work often explores the feminine experience as it relates to race, ritual, and relationships. Her film, which features herself, is an experimental comparative analysis of a real live woman versus the projected imager(ry) of a plastic one. The piece explores how we are manufactured by the self and by others. 

Mohau Modisakeng often relies on self-portraiture to reference his experience and identity as a black man in post-apartheid South Africa. His work will be featured in the fall exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in NEWSFEED: Anonymity & Social Media in African Revolutions and Beyond, curated by the museum’s curatorial fellows Jessica L. Moore and Nelson Nance. Modisakeng lives and works between Johannesburg and Cape Town. His work will be presented via QR Code in partnership with MoCADA. To emphasize the prevalence of new media, the QR code will be on display in CCNY’s gallery, linking to a video narration of the artists work on view at MoCADA.

Xaviera Simmons transplants diverse narratives into agrestal, engineered, and somatic landscapes. Conjuring photography, audio, sculpture, performance, and video, Simmons traverses assumptions surrounding place, time, the populations that activate given contexts, and the capacity of record and memory to alter perceptions thereof. Simmons grounds sociopolitical, personal, and art histories by testing them within the physical limits of experienced terrain. The result is the formation of non-linear narratives through manipulation, humor, observation and candor as unflappable as they are appropriative.

Exhibit Link

COVER: Xaviera Simmons / ARTPULSE / Spring 2012

Surveyor. An Interview with Xaviera Simmons
Text | Cara Despain


Excerpt:

Xaviera Simmons creates photographs, installations and multimedia works that use landscape as a base on which to layer complicated characters and open-ended, non-linear narratives. Using an amalgamation of histories and memories as communicated over time through text and images, Simmons creates new characters that depart from and engage with the histories locked within landscape that are free to reference, react to, ignore or enhance them. She keenly creates stagings that are not bound by any one history or group but rather represent a synthesis of her own influences and interests and how they relate to the history of art and the American landscape. In this way, her works collapse time and simultaneously create new questions and break old notions without being preoccupied with doing so. They examine a new kind of sublime-one that is in flux, like the characters that inhabit them.

Pick up a copy of the Spring 2012 issue of ARTpulse on newsstands now or read complete article here

EVENT: Conversations - Among Friends / The Museum of Modern Art / January 24, 2012

THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT.

PLEASE NOTE LOCATION CHANGE.

Conversations: Among Friends

Featuring artists Derrick Adams, Clifford Owens, Xaviera Simmons, and Mickalene Thomas

Introduction and Collectible essay by Christopher Y. Lew, Assistant Curator, MOMA PS1

Tuesday, January 24, 2012
7:00 pm program | 8:15 pm reception
Doors open at 6:45 pm

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
Celeste Bartos Theater 3
4 West 54th Street
New York City, NY

Tickets ($35) may be purchased at The Museum information and film desks, online at MoMA.org or through The Friends of Education Office.

All tickets will be held at the door.

Presented by the Friends as part of the series Conversations: Among Friends, this evening's program features a conversation between artists Derrick Adams, Clifford Owens, Xaviera Simmons, and Mickalene Thomas, with an introduction and Collectible essay by Christopher Y. Lew, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1. Following the program, guests are invited to continue the conversation and meet the participants at an intimate reception catered by Fantasy Fare in The Agnes Gund Garden Lobby.

Read full program event in PDF format here