Essentialist Trap News Today

After the opening of an-depth retrospective at the Pérez Art Museum, the artist Gary Simmons got real with us about art world politics.

From major solo shows of Sasha Gordon, Nam June Paik and Juan Francisco Elso to exhibitions around themes of food, magic and mystical animals

"Public Enemy" is full of displays where something is missing, forcing the viewer to ask what should be there and why it isn't.

For Gary Simmons, who observed the vast disconnect between the political nature of hip hop and the contemporary, predominantly abstract, art of the 1980s, the union of these two modalities engendered an artistic language that could speak simultaneously to multiple publics. Neither didactic nor illustrative, but rather legible and generative, Simmons’s work prompts viewers through subtly affective clues to examine their relationship to those symbols from popular culture that he re-forges int...

The fresh 60+ piece survey, which opens on June 13, 2023, is the most comprehensive look at Simmons’s work to date.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is planning a major exhibit of artist Gary Simmons work.