Xaviera Simmons | Sarasota Art Museum Exhibition

Xaviera Simmons (b. 1974 New York) engages her sweeping practice of photography painting video sound sculpture and installation to explore the construction of landscape language and complex histories in the United States and its empire building globally. Simmons’ trio of massive sculptures The structure the labor the foundation the escape the pause physically makes space for conversations regarding reparations amends and repairs specifically to the descendants of American chattel slavery a debt that is way past due and one that has been systemically denied for centuries. The work also delves deeply into the racial caste system and the construction of whiteness that has upheld this oppression. Simultaneously Simmons engages in monumental forms shapes and texture to construct the work. Drawing on the histories of sculpture plaster and steel work Simmons’ practice both engages formal and sociopolitical concerns.

Simmons’ work is exhibited nationally and internationally and belongs to major museum and private collections including The Museum of Modern Art New York; Deutsche Bank New York; UBS New York; The Guggenheim Museum New York; The Agnes Gund Art Collection New York; The De La Cruz Collection Miami The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Studio Museum in Harlem; ICA Miami; Perez Art Museum Miami; The Weatherspoon Art Museum Greensboro; The Nasher Museum of Art Durham; The High Museum Atlanta; among others.
Simmons received her BFA from Bard College (2004) after spending two years on a walking pilgrimage retracing the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade with Buddhist Monks. She was a visiting lecturer and the inaugural 2019 Solomon Fellow at Harvard University and was awarded The Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College in Spring 2020 among many honors. Simmons currently has works on view throughout the United States and Europe and she is represented by David Castillo Miami.
Courtesy of the artist and David Castillo Miami; Originally commissioned by Socrates Sculpture Park New York with support from the Ford Foundation.