17 Facts About Laurie Simmons

Laurie Simmons was born on October 3,1949 and is an American artist best known for her photographic and film work.

Laurie Simmons has exhibited at venues including MoMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Walker Art Center and Whitney Museum.

Laurie Simmons spent her formative years in Great Neck, Long Island and began photographing at the age of six, with a Kodak Brownie camera her father gave her.

Laurie Simmons studied printmaking, painting and sculpture at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, earning a BFA in 1971.

Laurie Simmons exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, Bienal de Sao Paulo, Biennale of Sydney and Austrian Triennial on Photography, and surveys at MOCA LA, MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others.

Laurie Simmons's striking uses of color, pattern and lighting are often cited as important factors in her work's articulation of cultural memory, emotion and interiority.

In earlier work, Laurie Simmons staged tableaux with dolls, toys and props, using visual immersion into miniature spaces to create moments of dramatic potency.

Laurie Simmons explored masculine and portraiture conventions, using ventriloquist dummies and toy or model train figurine setups.

Laurie Simmons's "Clothes Make the Man" series featured seven near-identical dummies differentiated mainly by clothing, calling to mind post-World War II conformity and the minute differences in appearance thought to distinguish people.

In 1994, Laurie Simmons extended the blurring of object and person in her work by commissioning a female dummy in her own likeness.

Laurie Simmons photographed it with six male dummies in simulated self-portraits that hinted at a crisis of self-fashioning in the face of a culture of artificiality and pretense; the images were a springboard for her first film.

Laurie Simmons made the transition to human models in two photographic series influenced by kigurumi, a Japanese costume play subculture in which participants become doll-like characters through masks, bodysuits, make-up or surgery.

Laurie Simmons co-starred in her daughter Lena Dunham's award-winning independent film, Tiny Furniture, as a mother and mid-career artist whose daughter returns home after university; shot in the Dunhams' New York apartment, it included fake "movie art" that Laurie Simmons created.

Laurie Simmons appeared in a 2011 Gossip Girl television episode as a portrait artist whose style resembled her "Interior Decorator" works.

Laurie Simmons collaborated with cosmetics entrepreneur Poppy King on a limited-edition poppy red lipstick, "Pushing It," that was available in tandem with her museum retrospectives in 2018 and 2019.

Laurie Simmons created the Kaleidoscope House with architect Peter Wheelwright, an interactive, three-story modernist dollhouse sold in stores, which she later photographed.

Laurie Simmons has been recognized with a Women in the Arts Award from the Brooklyn Museum, the International Artist Award from Anderson Ranch Arts Center, an American Academy in Rome residency, a John S Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.