In 1966, when artist Arthur Simms was just 4 years old, his mother left home in Kingston, Jamaica, for the United States to support her family as an au pair. Arthur, her father, and her three sisters continued her life in Kingston until they were able to join her in New York a few years later. Simms’s childhood in the Caribbean was like a dream that he remembers fondly because he laid the foundation for what was to come.
He was learning from Kingston artisans who, instead of buying a cart to use at the market, made it out of wheels and boxes. Simms began making small objects out of found materials—wood, plastic, string—that he used as toys.
“Jamaica may not be a rich country,” Simms, 61, said during an interview at his studio on Staten Island, New York, where he lives and works. “But people, man, have a soul. They did things with their hands.
Now with two simultaneous exhibitions in two countries—a retrospective featuring works spanning more than 30 years at Karma Gallery in Los Angeles (ending April 29) and site-specific installations in a deconsecrated church in Cremona, Italy (opening ends May 9)—it finally becomes clear how much Simms’s enigmatic drawings and assemblages owe to their origins.
Simms said he considered himself an artist since his sophomore year in Brooklyn, where his mother’s job boss, who was also, by a fluke, an immigration attorney, helped the family move.
By the time she was in high school, she was taking long walks from her house to the Brooklyn Museum, where she bought art supplies and reproduced the artists’ portraits on the walls—Rembrandt, Goya—substituting their faces for her own. While a student at Brooklyn College, he showed one of the paintings, based on Goya’s “Portrait of the Duke of Wellington,” to artist William T. Williams, his mentor, who taught him drawing and with whom he toured Manhattan galleries on field trips. field.
“Williams was nice,” Simms recalled. “He said that my painting reminded him of Haitian pictorial traditions.” But Simms was not satisfied: his colors were sparse and the work did not appear original. In 1985 he won a scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, in Maine, and began to experiment again with objects, as he had done in his childhood. “In Skowhegan I realized that it was the sculptural ideas that came most easily to me,” he said.
Yet the shape eluded him once more—until he decided to experiment with hemp rope. “And suddenly it made sense, it was like giving the sculpture a transparent skin,” he said. He showed these rope sculptures for the first time in his first solo exhibition, and also in his breakthrough show, in 1992, at the Philippe Briet Gallery in Manhattan. It has become his signature, wrapping like a mesh around the disparate objects he has collected over the years, making all of his oeuvre look like the giant collection of a well-traveled fisherman dedicated to salvaging lost items from the sea.
In 2002, as a member of the American Academy in Rome, Simms became interested in Caravaggio’s innovations using contrasting effects of light and shadow.
Today, in his expansive studio, postcards of Caravaggio paintings are glued to a shelf along with stones, shells, feathers and hemp wire. The next thing a visitor sees are paintings by his wife, the artist Lucy Fradkin. There is a giant board full of letters from his mother.
The studio is like a ship with an anchor—your compendium of memories stored in found objects and in words on the walls. “I have been creating my language for 40 years,” said the artist, reading one of his mother’s letters from his pile. “And I must continue, because it is the only way I can survive.”
By: YINKA ELUJOBA
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6656060, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-04-11 22:40:07
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