Kick off the opening of Gary Simmons: Public Enemy, and Miami Art Week, with a conversation between artist Gary Simmons and exhibition curators Jadine Collingwood, René Morales, and Franklin Sirmans.
Gary Simmons: Public Enemy, co-organized with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, is the first comprehensive career survey of the richly layered work of Gary Simmons and features nearly 70 sculptures, paintings, photographs, works on paper, and installations, as well as several large-scale wall drawings the artist will create on-site. Simmons, Collingwood, Morales, and Sirmans will discuss how Simmons and his work have played a key role in situating questions of race, class, and identity at the center of contemporary art discourse.
Over the course of his career, Simmons has aimed to expose and analyze histories of racism in visual culture. He has revealed traces of these histories in sports, cinema, literature, music, architecture, and urbanism, while drawing heavily on genres such as hip-hop, horror, and science fiction.
Simultaneous interpretation into American Sign Language, Haitian Creole, and Spanish will be provided.
About the Panelists
Gary Simmons was born in 1964 in New York City, where he was raised. Today he lives and works in Los Angeles. He received a BFA in 1988 from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and an MFA in 1990 from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia; he also studied at Hunter College, New York. He has received numerous awards, including the Studio Museum in Harlem Joyce Alexander Wein Prize (2013), the George Gund Foundation USA Gund Fellowship (2007), and the National Endowment for the Arts Interarts Grant (1990).
Simmons’ work has been the subject of major exhibitions worldwide. He has had solo exhibitions at institutional venues including California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Drawing Center, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Bohen Foundation, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Simmons’ work has been included in group exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Blaffer Art Museum, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis; and the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, among many other institutions.
His works can be found in numerous public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Baltimore Museum of Art; Colección Jumex, Mexico City; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Jadine Collingwood is associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA). She holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Chicago, where she completed her dissertation, “‘A Tragic Suburban Mentality’: Managerial Lyricism in Contemporary Art”. At the MCA, she has curated projects including Chicago Works: Caroline Kent (2021) and Martine Syms: She Mad Season One (2022). Previously, she worked at the Walker Art Center where she was part of the curatorial team for several exhibitions, including the major retrospective Siah Armajani: Follow This Line (with Victoria Sung, 2018), the group exhibition The Body Electric (with Pavel Pyś, 2019), and the multidisciplinary exhibition The Paradox of Stillness (with Vincenzo de Bellis, 2021). Prior to the Walker, Collingwood was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she assisted with the exhibitions Design Episodes: The Modern Chair (2016) and Helena Almeida: Work Is Never Finished (2017).
René Morales is the James W. Alsdorf chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), which he joined in 2022. His first exhibition for MCA, a major career survey of the work of Gary Simmons titled Public Enemy, opened in June 2023 and subsequently traveled to Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), where he had previously served the role of director of curatorial affairs and chief curator. At PAMM, where Morales worked for 16 years, he organized countless programs and nearly 60 exhibitions, including Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Surrounded Islands, 1980–83 (2018), Dara Friedman: Perfect Stranger (2017), Sarah Oppenheimer: S-281913 (2016), Susan Hiller: Lost and Found (2016), Marjetica Potrc: The School of the Forest (2015), Nicolas Lobo: The Leisure Pit (2015), Global Positioning Systems: Selections from the PAMM Collection (2014–15), Amelia Peláez: The Craft of Modernity, A Human Document: Selections from the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, and Monika Sosnowska: Market (2013–14). With the support of the Knight Foundation, Morales spearheaded the acquisition of over 300 works from the Sackner Archive for PAMM’s collection. Other notable acquisitions for PAMM include major works by Helio Oiticica, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Danh Vo, Virginia Jaramillo, and Gabriel Orozco.
Morales is a 2019 recipient of the prestigious Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellowship and has served as a juror for multiple prominent awards and grants, including the Whitney Museum’s 2019 Bucksbaum Prize. He currently sits on the board of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation. He is a former member of the board of the City of Miami Art in Public Places program, as well as the Professional Advisory Committee of the Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places program.
Prior to joining PAMM, he worked at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where he organized and co-organized several exhibitions, including Island Nations: New Art from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Morales studied at Swarthmore College, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in biopsychology and art history, and Brown University, where he received a Master of Arts in art history, focusing on the work of Odilon Redon before completing pre-doctoral research on the work of Wifredo Lam, and later on, the work of Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica.
Franklin Sirmans has been the director of Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) since fall 2015. Since coming to PAMM, he has overseen the acquisition of more than a thousand works of art by donation or purchase. At PAMM, Sirmans has pursued his vision of PAMM as “the people’s museum,” representing a Miami lens, by strengthening existing affiliate groups such as the PAMM Fund for African American Art and creating the International Women’s Committee and the Latin American and Latinx Art Fund. Sirmans has organized Toba Khedoori (2017) and he was co-curator of The World’s Game: Futbol and Contemporary Art (2018). Prior to his appointment, he was the department head and curator of contemporary art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) from 2010 until 2015.
At LACMA, Sirmans organized Toba Khedoori; Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada; Variations: Conversations in and around Abstract Painting; Fútbol: The Beautiful Game; and Ends and Exits: Contemporary Art from the Collections of LACMA and The Broad Art Foundation. From 2006 to 2010 he was curator of modern and contemporary art at The Menil Collection in Houston where he organized several exhibitions including NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith; Maurizio Cattelan: Is Their Life Before Death?; and Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964–1966. From 2005 to 2006, Sirmans was a curatorial advisory committee member at MoMA/PS1. He was the artistic director of Prospect.3 New Orleans from 2012 until 2014. He was awarded the 2007 David C. Driskell Prize, administered by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
