LAURIE SIMMONS

Early years and Background

Laurie Simmons grew up in Long Island, New York, and studied at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, receiving a BFA in 1971 before moving to New York, where she became associated with a group of artists loosely termed the Pictures Generation. Simmons has lived and worked in New York for much of her career, developing a practice that sits at the intersection of photography, film, sculpture, and, more recently, digital and AI-enabled image-making.

Laurie Simmons Artworks

In her work, Laurie Simmons stages meticulously lit tableaux using sets, miniatures, dolls, ventriloquist dummies, mannequins, and live models as stand-ins to examine how identity—particularly female identity—is scripted by mass media, domestic ideals, and photographic imagery. Across photography, film, and three-dimensional work, she constructs self-contained, psychologically charged worlds that hover between artifice and belief, prompting viewers to consider how images organise roles around home, work, desire, and performance.

Working conceptually, Simmons turns photography’s tendency to objectify—especially women—into a sustained critique of the medium itself. Drawing on childhood memories and media constructions of gender, she infuses her scenes with an eerie, dreamlike tone: her images may appear whimsical at first, but their child’s-play scenarios quickly feel unsettling as characters grapple with identity in environments where consumption, designer objects, and domestic space are exaggerated to absurd extremes.

Early staged photographs and dolls

From the mid-1970s, Laurie Simmons began photographing dollhouse interiors populated by dolls and toy furniture, establishing a vocabulary in which miniature domestic spaces become proxies for real-world social scripts. These works, including early series of interiors and doll figures in precisely arranged rooms, are often cited as foundational to Simmons’ position within the Pictures Generation and to debates about the politics of representation in contemporary photography.

Underwater figures and ‘Underneath’ bodies

In the 1980s and 1990s, Simmons developed series such as ‘Water Ballet’ and ‘Family Collision’ (c. 1980s—1990s), in which human bodies and figurines appear submerged in atmospheric underwater scenes, followed by the ‘Underneath’ (late 1990s) photographs featuring mannequins whose clothing opens onto idealised domestic interiors in place of flesh. These bodies of work, surveyed together in Underwater & Underneath (30 November—17 January) at Andrew Reed Gallery in Miami, track Simmons’ evolution from dreamlike spaces of apparent liberation towards a sharper examination of how domestic fantasies are projected onto and through the body.

Big Camera/Little Camera and later series

Laurie Simmons’ survey Big Camera/Little Camera (2018—2019) at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago brought together four decades of work, from dollhouse photographs to large-scale images of ‘walking’ objects, ventriloquist dummies, and portrait-based series that extend her interest in performance and masquerade. The exhibition highlighted the continuity between Simmons’ analogue table-top sets and later series incorporating life-sized figures, costumes, and cinematic lighting, underscoring her sustained focus on how photography mediates experience.

Autofiction, AI, and new image worlds

In Laurie Simmons: Autofiction (2023—2024), presented by YoungArts in Miami, Simmons showed new work that engaged explicitly with artificial intelligence and evolving tools of image production, extending her long-running interest in staged reality into contemporary debates about AI-generated pictures. The exhibition, part of Miami Art Week, connected her practice to a younger generation of artists and audiences while positioning her experiments with digital processes as a continuation—rather than a break—from her investigations into how images are authored, manipulated, and consumed.

Installed in the glass-walled YoungArts Jewel Box on Biscayne Boulevard, Autofiction brought together photographic and moving-image works that build on Simmons’ use of surrogates and constructed sets while responding to the possibilities and anxieties of AI-driven image-making. Immersing viewers in layered, often humorous yet unsettling scenes, the exhibition underscored Simmons’ role as a key voice in discussions about how contemporary artists use technology to interrogate authorship, authenticity, and the persistence of the photographic image.

Laurie Simmon’s film work

Laurie Simmons’ film work extends the staged, surrogate-driven worlds of her photographs into time-based narratives that examine performance, gender, and the mechanics of looking. Her first major film, The Music of Regret (2006) , is a three-act mini-musical starring Meryl Streep, Adam Guettel, puppets, ventriloquist dummies, and Simmons’ signature ‘walking objects’, and premiered at The Museum of Modern Art in New York before screening at institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, and Cinema Rise in Tokyo.

Simmons’ narrative feature My Art (2016) —in which she plays a middle-aged artist restaging scenes from classic films—had its international premiere at the Venice Film Festival and North American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, reinforcing her standing in both the art and cinema worlds. Across these acclaimed projects, which have since been revisited via platforms such as the Criterion Channel and museum retrospectives, Simmons uses film to animate the characters and sets from her photographs, deepening her exploration of regret, fantasy, ageing, and women’s roles within visual culture.

Institutional context and collections

Laurie Simmons has had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1 in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Baltimore Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, the Gothenburg Museum of Art, the Neues Museum in Nuremberg, the Jewish Museum in New York, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, among others. Her work is held in major museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Laurie Simmons Exhibitions

Laurie Simmons has been the subject of both solo exhibitions and group exhibitions at important institutions and galleries worldwide.

• Underwater & Underneath (2025—2026), Andrew Reed Gallery, Miami
• Laurie Simmons & Peter Wheelwright: The Kaleidoscope (...Bigger) House (2024—2025), public installation, Miami Design District, Miami, organised with Almine Rech and ICA Miami
• Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera (2018—2019), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago
• Laurie Simmons: How We See (2015), The Jewish Museum, New York
• The Fabulous World of Laurie Simmons (2014), Neues Museum, Nuremberg.

Simmons has also presented solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose; Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg; and Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis.

Laurie Simmons FAQs

Ocula | 2025