Gary Simmons

The wall drawings and paintings of Gary Simmons, which typically use text or architectural drafts as their subject, take on received notions of gender, race, class, and other socially determined markers of identity. Simmons often uses language or site-specific drawings of buildings, painted and then smeared in ways that evoke movement through time and space and call up allusions to history or cinema. His 2010 wall painting Credit Roll reproduced the names of blaxploitation films of the 1970s in white text over brown paint. The vertical smearing of the titles recalled the scrolling of credits in a movie and the passage of a complicated and charged history of self-representation. His work has appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hammer Museum at UCLA, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.