Laurie Simmons

Untitled Dummy/Beach 1

1990

Born 1949, Long Island, New York; lives in New York. Laurie Simmons received her BFA degree from the Tyler School of Art in 1971 and has since been constructing and photographing life-like narratives. As her subjects, she has been using dolls, ventriloquist dummies, finger puppets and costumed people. After a move to New York in 1973, Simmons began taking pictures of her friends, but quickly found her niche in photographing dolls. She has since photographed small self-contained worlds that touch on nostalgia and memory. Simmons’s photographs capture “living objects,” that at first glance appear whimsical and childlike, but, in fact, take on an unnerving quality, with a deep psychological subtext. Simmons has had major exhibitions including a critically acclaimed retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1997, followed by an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has also participated in two Whitney Biennial exhibitions (1985, 1991) and received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1984, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1997, and a Roy Lichtenstein Residency in Visual Arts from the American Academy in Rome in 2005. She is widely represented in both private and public collections all over the globe.