CalArts alum Gary Simmons (Art MFA 90) is one of 10 artists selected for the Tribeca Festival’s 2022 Artist Awards Program. Each year, the festival taps distinguished visual artists to create artwork that will be awarded to winning festival filmmakers, creating a direct correlation between art and film.
The other artists participating in the program are Deborah Roberts, February James, Hank Willis Thomas, Leilah Babirye, Ming Smith, Nicoletta Darita de la Brown, Nina Chanel Abney, Ouattara Watts, and Wardell Milan.
Simmons’ work, Black Ark Stars (Process Black), 2022, is a lithograph and screenprint with Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee on paper that will be presented to the winner of the Best International Narrative Feature category.
The New York-born Simmons’ multidisciplinary art practice has included “icons and stereotypes of American popular culture to create works that address personal and collective experiences of race and class.”
Select solo exhibitions include Remembering Tomorrow, which closed at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles in May; Gary Simmons at TANK Shanghai, Shanghai, China (2021); Gary Simmons: Screaming into the Ether at Metro Pictures, New York (2020); Fade to Black at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2017); and Balcony Seating Only at Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2017).
