Gary Simmons (artist)

Using icons and stereotypes of American popular culture, he creates works that address personal and collective experiences of race and class.

[1] Shortly after his graduate studies, Simmons found a studio back home at a former vocational school in Manhattan, New York.

His space was empty but for several old-fashioned, wooden, rolling classroom chalkboards, which he began using as canvases in a series of early works about mis-education and conceptions of racial and class identity.

He recreates cartoons that depict black caricatures, some clear and some erased into a dreamy blur.

Considering himself primarily a sculptor, Simmons early three-dimensional work incorporated powerfully suggestive symbols of oppression including Ku Klux Klan signs, hoods and nooses.

In a later work, Big Still (2001), Simmons addresses the state of the poor whites in Appalachia and the South.

He's commenting on the concept of "white trash," and that their disenfranchised life was similar to the urban black communities.