Laurie Simmons: Difference between revisions

Laurie Simmons
Laurie Simmons
Nationality	American
Education	Tyler School of Art
Known for	artist and photographer
Awards	National Endowment for the Arts Grant, 1984. Guggenheim Fellowship, 1997. Roy Lichtenstein Residency in Visual Arts, The American Academy in Rome, 2005. Distinguished Alumni Award, Temple University, 2006.

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Laurie Simmons is an artist and photographer currently working in New York.

Biography

Laurie Simmons was born in Long Island, New York, in 1949. She received a BFA from Tyler School of Art in 1971.Simmons lives and works in New York City and Cornwall, Connecticut with her husband, the painter Carroll Dunham, and their two daughters, Lena and Grace.^[2]

Career

Since the mid 1970s, Simmons has staged scenes for her camera with dolls, ventriloquist dummies, objects on legs and occasionally people, to create images with intensely psychological subtexts.

Along with Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, Laurie Simmons is counted as a core member of the Pictures Generation, whose appropriations, manipulations and simulations of various photographic genres profoundly altered the course of late-20th-century art.
In the mid-1970s, however, Ms. Simmons was a young art school graduate in New York hoping to support herself as a freelance commercial photographer. Aiming to get a job illustrating a toy company catalog, she photographed dollhouse furniture. She didn’t get the assignment, but she found a vision whose resonant possibilities can be seen in this enchanting exhibition of black-and-white images dating mostly from 1976 and ’77.^[3]

Simmons’ first mature works, shot in 1976, were black and white images taken in a dollhouse, un-peopled variations on each room in the house, particularly the bathroom, using sunlight and different angles to create a “dazzling, dreamlike stage set.”^[4] She then added a housewife doll into a kitchen set, and "...photographed the figure over and over in various positions--standing and sitting at the table, at the counter, in a corner, standing on her head with the kitchen in disarray. The mood is dramatically different than in the bathroom views. The housewife seems hysterical..."^[5]

In 1978 Simmons began shooting the figures in the dollhouse in color, to create the "Early Color Interiors" series. At that time, color photography was "...more commonly associated with the artifice of commercial photography while black-and-white was perceived to be more truthful. By using the techniques and processes identified with advertising, fashion, and film, Simmons linked her work to a realm of suspended belief--the realm of fantasy and fiction that sustained many of her memories and longings."^[6]

...Setting up small rooms with dolls in them was a way for me to experience photography without taking my camera out to the street. I felt that I could set up my own world right around me, without ever having to leave the studio...I would set up these interiors and then shoot them at different times during the day as the light changed, and it became, for me, like a type of animation. By moving around the figures, I was, in fact, animating them, even though I was taking still photographs...Scale wasn't an issue to me. If the loaf of bread was half the size of the woman herself, that wasn't a problem. That seemed like it gave it a kind of magic. The chairs, the food, the stove, the sink, the woman. I like the way they all occupy the same importance in the picture. I like the way, in that kitchen, it's always five after six. It's always the dinner hour. The space in the interior pictures seems so claustrophobic, I can't imagine putting more than one doll in it. It's a really tight space where every inch of the space has something going on, whether it's a color or an object, or air that you can taste and feel, so I can't imagine two dolls being able to breathe in this space. I see these pictures as being a little lonely, like where is the rest of the world, where are the other people, where's the rest of the family? And I think that loneliness is something that I was trying to speak to when I made the pictures. It's interesting for me that a picture can be so colorful and so bright and so vivacious and so lonely at the same time.^[7]

Simmons had her first solo show at Artists Space, a non-profit gallery in New York, in 1979, showing the "Early Color Interiors".^[8] A few months after this she exhibited work at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.^[9]

By the early 1980s Simmons was at the forefront of a new generation of artists, predominantly women, whose use of the media as subject began a new dialogue in contemporary art. In 1980 Simmons began showing at the gallery Metro Pictures in New York.^[10] In the early 1980s she created the series "Color-Coordinated Interiors", which used Japanese dolls called Teenettes, monochrome toys of women who Simmons photographed in front of rear projection images of interior decorated rooms.^[11] The dolls matched the color theme of the rooms. Simmons stated about the series,

...I came across these very strange and sci-fi looking dolls. They're called the "Teenettes" and they were a Japanese toy maker's idea about the American woman. They're kind of distorted, as you might expect, but the fact that they were colored monochromatically was a terrific metaphor for me...I simply worked in a very formulaic way to find rooms that were decorated in the style that was prevalent in the sixties and seventies where a room would have a theme color. So the green doll would be placed in a green room, the red doll in a red room, the yellow doll in a yellow room, and the blue doll in a blue room, and that for me said something about women actually becoming or fading into their environment.^[12]

The series that followed was "Tourism," in 1984, which also used the "Teenette" dolls, but showed them in groups visiting famous places around the world, including the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the Parthenon, and the Taj Mahal.^[13] This series investigated the mediation of these places through photography and media instead of real experience. "She used the same strategy to shoot the "Tourism" series as she used for the "Color-Coordinated Interiors," populating unrealistically pristine postcard views with her dolls via rear projection. The figures are color-cued to the background scene, which was often unintentionally monochromatic due owing to the poor quality of the slide."^[14] The slides were collected by Simmons from tourist shops and museum collections.

In 1987 Simmons visited the Vent Haven Ventriloquist Museum in Kentucky and over a period of a few years photographed various dummies and props there, resulting in the "Talking Objects" series.^[15]

Simmons had a mid-career retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1997.^[16]

In 2001, Simmons designed, with the architect Peter Wheelwright, an interactive modernist dollhouse called the "Kaleidoscope House." The house was decorated with miniature artwork and furniture by contemporary artists and designers.^[17]

The Kaleidoscope House, a collaborative project with Bozart Toys which produces toys with leading contemporary artists, is an interactive creative play environment for 6 year olds and above. The 1:12 scale modernist architectural house, with sliding transparent color walls, invites children and adults to fill it with an accessory line of modern furniture from contemporary furniture designers including Dakota Jackson, Karim Rashid, Ron Arad, Keiser/ Newman and Robert Kitchen. The house features paintings, photographs and sculpture by Peter Halley, Carroll Dunham, Laurie Simmons, Cindy Sherman, Mel Kendrick, Mel Bochner and realistic "action figures" of the artist, architect and family. As the interchangeable exterior walls of the dollhouse slide open and overlap one another, their colors change in hue and value. The floor plan measures 22 x 28 x 24 inches.^[18]

Also in 2001, Simmons began her "Instant Decorator" series, which was based on a 1976 interior decorating book of the same name, that provided templates of household rooms for the client to fill with swatches of fabric and paint samples. The series features works that are collage-like and opulently filled with accessories and characters in dramatic mises en scène.^[19]

In 2006 Simmons made her first film "The Music of Regret," a mini musical in three acts which premiered at MoMA and starred Meryl Streep.

[Simmons] combines her prior work into a forty-minute musical for which she wrote the words and Michael Rohatyn composed the music. The first part puts two families of puppets at odds over a job promotion; the second features Meryl Streep in romantic duets with a dummy (who is voiced by Adam Guettel); the third shows the legged objects, embodied by the Alvin Ailey 2 company, taking the stage to audition for their roles.^[20]

The film has since screened at museums and festivals worldwide including the Walker Art Center, the Hammer Museum, the Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, the Kunst Film Biennale in Cologne, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.^[21] Some of the imagery in the film is prefigured in a 1994 series of photographs called "Music of Regret," where Simmons had a mannequin made in her likeness, who appears in romantic settings with other, male, ventriloquist dummies. "The title reminds us how a song or melody can stir up memories, particularly of the sentimental years of young romance."^[22]

In 2008, Simmons collaborated with the designer Thakoon Panichgul to create fabrics for his Spring 2009 line. The pattern featured a variation on Simmons' series "Walking & Lying Objects" from the late eighties, which involved various objects that are animated with legs in different positions. The fabric for Thakoon's line was based on legs paired with a rose.^[23]

The Whitney Museum of American Art commissioned Simmons to create the seventeenth annual American Art Award for them in 2008. Simmons created a bronze statue, gilded in 24 karat gold, of the iconic museum building standing on legs.^[24] Simmons also used objects on legs in her series "Walking & Lying Objects" from the late 1980s. The first work in this series is a work from 1987 titled "Walking Camera I (Jimmy the Camera)," of Simmons's friend and former roommate, the late artist Jimmy De Sana, wearing an old-fashioned box camera costume. The later photographs that follow use miniatures and small doll legs. "As she animates the objects, Simmons plays out various roles. Her transformed women parade across a simulated stage as if in a fashion show or a musical, wearing the accoutrements with which they are identified."^[25] Simmons also created an award for the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002, of a film movie camera standing on legs.^[26]

In 2009, Simmons collaborated with the London-based designer Peter Jensen, on his Spring 2010 line. The collaboration culminated in a presentation at London Fashion Week, with Simmons acting both as the "muse" for the conception of the collection and creating photographs for the event and for all presentation documents.^[27]

Simmons starred in a feature-length film by her daughter Lena Dunham, called Tiny Furniture, which was filmed in 2009 and was featured at the South by Southwest film festival in 2010. The film won the Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature.^[28]

Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC; the Hara Museum in Tokyo; the Ellipse Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, among others.^[29]

Books

"Color Coordinated Interiors 1983." Skarstedt Fine Art, 2007. ISBN 0-9709090-6-3

"Walking, Talking, Lying." Aperture, 2005. ISBN 1-931788-59-6

"In and Around the House: Photographs 1976-78." Carolina Nitsch Editions, 2003. ISBN 0-9740666-0-5

"Photographs 1978/79." Skarstedt Fine Art, 2002. ISBN 0-9709090-3-9

"The Music of Regret." The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997. ISBN 0-912298-69-3

"Laurie Simmons." A. R. T. Press, 1994. ISBN 0-923183-13-2

"Laurie Simmons, San Jose Museum of Art." The San Jose Museum of Art, 1990. ISBN 0-938175-10-6

"Laurie Simmons, Water Ballet/Family Collision." Walker Art Center, 1987. ISBN 0-935640-23-1

"LS Laurie Simmons." PARCO CO., LTD. Tokyo, 1987. ISBN 4-89194-155-3

"In and Around the House." CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, New York, 1983. ISBN 0-939784-046-8

References

^ http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/simmons/
^ Erna Hecey Gallery
^ Johnson, Ken “Laurie Simmons: In and Around the House.” The New York Times, 20 June 2008, E:18
^ Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997
^ Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997
^ Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997
^ Simmons, Laurie, Audio Program excerpt from MoMA2000: Open Ends (1960–2000), September 28, 2000–March 4, 2001
^ Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997
^ "Conversation: Laurie Simmons and Marvin Heiferman", Art in America, April 2009, p. 110-121
^ "Conversation: Laurie Simmons and Marvin Heiferman", Art in America, April 2009, p. 110-121
^ Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997
^ Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997
^ Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997
^ Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997
^ "Laurie Simmons." A. R. T. Press, 1994.
^ Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997
^ PMWArchitects
^ Laurie Simmmons website
^ Yablonsky, Linda, “Better, More Surreal Homes and Collages ,” The New York Times, 15 February 2004, p. 18
^ “Goings on About Town,” The New Yorker, 29 May 2006, pp. 6, 18
^ Sperone Westwater
^ Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997
^ Lau, Venessa “Rose Land: A collaboration with artist Laurie Simmons blossoms at Thakoon,” W Magazine, November 2008
^ Laurie Simmmons website
^ Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997
^ Laurie Simmmons website
^ W Editors' Blog
^ Tiny Furniture
^ Sperone Westwater

Sources

PBS: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/simmons/index.html

Guggenheim Museum: http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_works_228_0.html

Museum of Modern Art: http://moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A7015&page_number=1&template_id=6&sort_order=1

Metropolitan Museum of Art: http://www.metmuseum.org/TOAH/hd/pcgn/ho_2004.246.htm

The New York Times: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CE1DD103AF937A15752C1A9669C8B63&scp=1&sq=laurie%20simmons&st=cse

The New York Times: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9504E7D7143DF934A35755C0A9649C8B63&scp=3&sq=laurie%20simmons&st=cse

The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/arts/design/20wart.html?_r=1&scp=19&sq=laurie%20simmons&st=cse&oref=slogin

“Laurie Simmons: Color Coordinated Interiors 1983,” New York: Skarstedt Gallery, 2007.

Linkler, Kate. “Laurie Simmons: Walking, Talking, Lying,” Aperture Foundation, 2005

External links

Laurie Simmons' The Music of Regret has been released on Lowave

Template:Persondata

[1] ttp://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/simmons/

[2] Erna Hecey Gallery

[3] Johnson, Ken “Laurie Simmons: In and Around the House.” The New York Times, 20 June 2008, E:18

[4] Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997

[5] Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997

[6] Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997

[7] Simmons, Laurie, Audio Program excerpt from MoMA2000: Open Ends (1960–2000), September 28, 2000–March 4, 2001

[8] Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997

[9] "Conversation: Laurie Simmons and Marvin Heiferman", Art in America, April 2009, p. 110-121

[10] "Conversation: Laurie Simmons and Marvin Heiferman", Art in America, April 2009, p. 110-121

[11] Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997

[12] Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997

[13] Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997

[14] Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997

[15] "Laurie Simmons." A. R. T. Press, 1994.

[16] Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997

[17] PMWArchitects

[18] Laurie Simmmons website

[19] Yablonsky, Linda, “Better, More Surreal Homes and Collages ,” The New York Times, 15 February 2004, p. 18

[20] “Goings on About Town,” The New Yorker, 29 May 2006, pp. 6, 18

[21] Sperone Westwater

[22] Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997

[23] Lau, Venessa “Rose Land: A collaboration with artist Laurie Simmons blossoms at Thakoon,” W Magazine, November 2008

[24] Laurie Simmmons website

[25] Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997

[26] Laurie Simmmons website

[27] W Editors' Blog

[28] Tiny Furniture

[29] Sperone Westwater

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@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
+{{Infobox artist
-{{COI|date=January 2011}}
+| name          = Laurie Simmons
+| birthdate     = {{Birth date and age|1949|10|03|mf=y}}
+| birthplace      = [[Long Island, NY]]
+| nationality   = [[United States|American]]
+| field         = artist and photographer
+| training      = [[Tyler School of Art]]
+| awards        = [[National Endowment for the Arts]] Grant, 1984.
+		[[Guggenheim Fellowship]], 1997.
+		Roy Lichtenstein Residency in Visual Arts, The American Academy in Rome, 2005.
+		Distinguished Alumni Award, Temple University, 2006.
+<ref>http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/simmons/</ref>
+}}
 {{morefootnotes|date=September 2008}}
 '''Laurie Simmons''' is an artist and photographer currently working in [[New York]].
@@ Line 10: / Line 26: @@
 Since the mid 1970s, Simmons has staged scenes for her camera with dolls, ventriloquist dummies, objects on legs and occasionally people, to create images with intensely psychological subtexts.
+<blockquote>
-<blockquote>Along with Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, Laurie Simmons is counted as a core member of the Pictures Generation, whose appropriations, manipulations and simulations of various photographic genres profoundly altered the course of late-20th-century art. <ref>Johnson, Ken “Laurie Simmons: In and Around the House.” ''The New York Times'', 20 June 2008, E:18</ref></blockquote>
+Along with Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, Laurie Simmons is counted as a core member of the Pictures Generation, whose appropriations, manipulations and simulations of various photographic genres profoundly altered the course of late-20th-century art.
+In the mid-1970s, however, Ms. Simmons was a young art school graduate in New York hoping to support herself as a freelance commercial photographer. Aiming to get a job illustrating a toy company catalog, she photographed dollhouse furniture. She didn’t get the assignment, but she found a vision whose resonant possibilities can be seen in this enchanting exhibition of black-and-white images dating mostly from 1976 and ’77.<ref>Johnson, Ken “Laurie Simmons: In and Around the House.” ''The New York Times'', 20 June 2008, E:18</ref></blockquote>
 Simmons’ first mature works, shot in 1976, were black and white images taken in a dollhouse, un-peopled variations on each room in the house, particularly the bathroom, using sunlight and different angles to create a “dazzling, dreamlike stage set.”<ref>Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997</ref> She then added a housewife doll into a kitchen set, and "...photographed the figure over and over in various positions--standing and sitting at the table, at the counter, in a corner, standing on her head with the kitchen in disarray. The mood is dramatically different than in the bathroom views. The housewife seems hysterical..."<ref>Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997</ref>
@@ Line 16: / Line 34: @@
 In 1978 Simmons began shooting the figures in the dollhouse in color, to create the "Early Color Interiors" series. At that time, color photography was "...more commonly associated with the artifice of commercial photography while black-and-white was perceived to be more truthful. By using the techniques and processes identified with advertising, fashion, and film, Simmons linked her work to a realm of suspended belief--the realm of fantasy and fiction that sustained many of her memories and longings."<ref>Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997</ref>
+<blockquote>
+...Setting up small rooms with dolls in them was a way for me to experience photography without taking my camera out to the street. I felt that I could set up my own world right around me, without ever having to leave the studio...I would set up these interiors and then shoot them at different times during the day as the light changed, and it became, for me, like a type of animation. By moving around the figures, I was, in fact, animating them, even though I was taking still photographs...Scale wasn't an issue to me. If the loaf of bread was half the size of the woman herself, that wasn't a problem. That seemed like it gave it a kind of magic. The chairs, the food, the stove, the sink, the woman. I like the way they all occupy the same importance in the picture. I like the way, in that kitchen, it's always five after six. It's always the dinner hour.
+The space in the interior pictures seems so claustrophobic, I can't imagine putting more than one doll in it. It's a really tight space where every inch of the space has something going on, whether it's a color or an object, or air that you can taste and feel, so I can't imagine two dolls being able to breathe in this space.
+I see these pictures as being a little lonely, like where is the rest of the world, where are the other people, where's the rest of the family? And I think that loneliness is something that I was trying to speak to when I made the pictures. It's interesting for me that a picture can be so colorful and so bright and so vivacious and so lonely at the same time.<ref>[http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=55981 Simmons, Laurie, Audio Program excerpt from MoMA2000: Open Ends (1960–2000), September 28, 2000–March 4, 2001]</ref>
+</blockquote>
 Simmons had her first solo show at [[Artists Space]], a non-profit gallery in New York, in 1979, showing the "Early Color Interiors".<ref>Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997</ref> A few months after this she exhibited work at [[P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center]].<ref>"Conversation: Laurie Simmons and Marvin Heiferman", Art in America, April 2009, p. 110-121</ref>
-In 1980 Simmons began showing at the gallery Metro Pictures in New York.<ref>"Conversation: Laurie Simmons and Marvin Heiferman", Art in America, April 2009, p. 110-121</ref>
+By the early 1980s Simmons was at the forefront of a new generation of artists, predominantly women, whose use of the media as subject began a new dialogue in contemporary art. In 1980 Simmons began showing at the gallery Metro Pictures in New York.<ref>"Conversation: Laurie Simmons and Marvin Heiferman", Art in America, April 2009, p. 110-121</ref>
-In the early 1980s she created the series "Color-Coordinated Interiors", which used Japanese dolls called Teenettes, monochrome toys of women who Simmons photographed in front of rear projection images of interior decorated rooms.<ref>Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997</ref> The dolls matched the color theme of the rooms.
+In the early 1980s she created the series "Color-Coordinated Interiors", which used Japanese dolls called Teenettes, monochrome toys of women who Simmons photographed in front of rear projection images of interior decorated rooms.<ref>Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997</ref> The dolls matched the color theme of the rooms. Simmons stated about the series,
+<blockquote>
+...I came across these very strange and sci-fi looking dolls. They're called the "Teenettes" and they were a Japanese toy maker's idea about the American woman. They're kind of distorted, as you might expect, but the fact that they were colored monochromatically was a terrific metaphor for me...I simply worked in a very formulaic way to find rooms that were decorated in the style that was prevalent in the sixties and seventies where a room would have a theme color. So the green doll would be placed in a green room, the red doll in a red room, the yellow doll in a yellow room, and the blue doll in a blue room, and that for me said something about women actually becoming or fading into their environment.<ref>Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997</ref></blockquote>
 The series that followed was "Tourism," in 1984, which also used the "Teenette" dolls, but showed them in groups visiting famous places around the world, including the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the Parthenon, and the Taj Mahal.<ref>Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997</ref> This series investigated the mediation of these places through photography and media instead of real experience. "She used the same strategy to shoot the "Tourism" series as she used for the "Color-Coordinated Interiors," populating unrealistically pristine postcard views with her dolls via rear projection. The figures are color-cued to the background scene, which was often unintentionally monochromatic due owing to the poor quality of the slide."<ref>Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997</ref> The slides were collected by Simmons from tourist shops and museum collections.
-Simmons used objects on legs in her series "Walking & Lying Objects" from the late 1980s. The first work in this series is a work from 1987 titled "Walking Camera I (Jimmy the Camera)," of Simmons's friend and former roommate, the late artist [[Jimmy De Sana]], wearing an old-fashioned box camera costume. The later photographs that follow use miniatures and small doll legs. "As she animates the objects, Simmons plays out various roles. Her transformed women parade across a simulated stage as if in a fashion show or a musical, wearing the accoutrements with which they are identified."<ref>Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997</ref>
 In 1987 Simmons visited the Vent Haven Ventriloquist Museum in Kentucky and over a period of a few years photographed various dummies and props there, resulting in the "Talking Objects" series.<ref>"Laurie Simmons." A. R. T. Press, 1994.</ref>
@@ Line 30: / Line 54: @@
 In 2001, Simmons designed, with the architect Peter Wheelwright, an interactive modernist dollhouse called the "Kaleidoscope House." The house was decorated with miniature artwork and furniture by contemporary artists and designers.<ref>[http://www.pmwarchitects.com/kaleido.htm PMWArchitects]</ref>
+<blockquote>
+The Kaleidoscope House, a collaborative project with Bozart Toys which produces toys with leading contemporary artists, is an interactive creative play environment for 6 year olds and above. The 1:12 scale modernist architectural house, with sliding transparent color walls, invites children and adults to fill it with an accessory line of modern furniture from contemporary furniture designers including Dakota Jackson, Karim Rashid, Ron Arad, Keiser/ Newman and Robert Kitchen. The house features paintings, photographs and sculpture by Peter Halley, Carroll Dunham, Laurie Simmons, Cindy Sherman, Mel Kendrick, Mel Bochner and realistic "action figures" of the artist, architect and family. As the interchangeable exterior walls of the dollhouse slide open and overlap one another, their colors change in hue and value. The floor plan measures 22 x 28 x 24 inches.<ref>[http://www.lauriesimmons.net/index.php?mode=gallery&section_id=153 Laurie Simmmons website]</ref> </blockquote>
 Also in 2001, Simmons began her "Instant Decorator" series, which was based on a 1976 interior decorating book of the same name, that provided templates of household rooms for the client to fill with swatches of fabric and paint samples. The series features works that are collage-like and opulently filled with accessories and characters in dramatic mises en scène.<ref>Yablonsky, Linda, “Better, More Surreal Homes and Collages ,” The New York Times, 15 February 2004, p. 18</ref>
+In 2006 Simmons made her first film "The Music of Regret," a mini musical in three acts which premiered at [[MoMA]] and starred [[Meryl Streep]].
-In 2005 Simmons created “The Boxes” (Ardis Vinklers) named for Ardis Vinklers, a Latvian artist, and his three lightboxes, which Simmons discovered at an antique fair. The new series continues the artist’s ongoing project of staging scenes for her camera with various figures inside constructed environments. Combining Vinklers’ original tableaus of a ballroom, a library, and an art gallery with her own aesthetic, Simmons placed figures inside the furnished rooms, using various magazine cut-outs of glamorous women and one male doll to create imaginary narratives. <ref>[http://www.artcat.com/exhibits/2386]</ref>
+<blockquote>
+[Simmons] combines her prior work into a forty-minute musical for which she wrote the words and Michael Rohatyn composed the music. The first part puts two families of puppets at odds over a job promotion; the second features Meryl Streep in romantic duets with a  dummy (who is voiced by [[Adam Guettel]]); the third shows the legged objects, embodied by the [[Alvin Ailey]] 2 company, taking the stage to audition for their roles.<ref>“Goings on About Town,” The New Yorker, 29 May 2006, pp. 6, 18</ref>
-In 2006 Simmons made her first film "The Music of Regret," a mini musical in three acts which premiered at [[MoMA]] and starred [[Meryl Streep]].<ref>Jensen, Peter, "Laurie," Tom Watt, 2010, p.20</ref>
+</blockquote>
-The film has since screened at museums and festivals worldwide including the [[Walker Art Center]], the [[Hammer Museum]], the [[Tate Modern]], the [[Centre Pompidou]], the Kunst Film Biennale in [[Cologne]], and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.<ref>Jensen, Peter, "Laurie," Tom Watt, 2010, p.20</ref>
+The film has since screened at museums and festivals worldwide including the [[Walker Art Center]], the [[Hammer Museum]], the [[Tate Modern]], the [[Centre Pompidou]], the Kunst Film Biennale in [[Cologne]], and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.<ref>[http://www.speronewestwater.com/cgi-bin/iowa/artists/bio.html?record=109 Sperone Westwater]</ref>
 Some of the imagery in the film is prefigured in a 1994 series of photographs called "Music of Regret," where Simmons had a mannequin made in her likeness, who appears in romantic settings with other, male, ventriloquist dummies. "The title reminds us how a song or melody can stir up memories, particularly of the sentimental years of young romance."<ref>Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997</ref>
 In 2008, Simmons collaborated with the designer [[Thakoon Panichgul]] to create fabrics for his Spring 2009 line. The pattern featured a variation on Simmons' series "Walking & Lying Objects" from the late eighties, which involved various objects that are animated with legs in different positions. The fabric for Thakoon's line was based on legs paired with a rose.<ref>[http://www.wmagazine.com/fashion/2008/11/laurie_simmons Lau, Venessa “Rose Land: A collaboration with artist Laurie Simmons blossoms at Thakoon,” W Magazine, November 2008]</ref>
+The [[Whitney Museum of American Art]] commissioned Simmons to create the seventeenth annual American Art Award for them in 2008. Simmons created a bronze statue, gilded in 24 karat gold, of the iconic museum building standing on legs.<ref>[http://www.lauriesimmons.net/index.php?mode=objectlist&section_id=118&object_id=213 Laurie Simmmons website]</ref> Simmons also used objects on legs in her series "Walking & Lying Objects" from the late 1980s. The first work in this series is a work from 1987 titled "Walking Camera I (Jimmy the Camera)," of Simmons's friend and former roommate, the late artist [[Jimmy De Sana]], wearing an old-fashioned box camera costume. The later photographs that follow use miniatures and small doll legs. "As she animates the objects, Simmons plays out various roles. Her transformed women parade across a simulated stage as if in a fashion show or a musical, wearing the accoutrements with which they are identified."<ref>Howard, Jan, "The Music of Regret," The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997</ref> Simmons also created an award for the [[Tribeca Film Festival]] in 2002, of a film movie camera standing on legs.<ref>[http://www.lauriesimmons.net/index.php?mode=objectlist&section_id=118&object_id=213 Laurie Simmmons website]</ref>
-In 2009, Simmons collaborated with the London-based designer Peter Jensen, on his Spring 2010 line. The collaboration culminated in a presentation at London Fashion Week, with Simmons acting both as the "muse" for the conception of the collection and creating photographs for the event and for all presentation documents.<ref>[http://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/4942/1/peter-jensen-ss-10]</ref>
+In 2009, Simmons collaborated with the London-based designer Peter Jensen, on his Spring 2010 line. The collaboration culminated in a presentation at London Fashion Week, with Simmons acting both as the "muse" for the conception of the collection and creating photographs for the event and for all presentation documents.<ref>[http://www.wmagazine.com/w/blogs/editorsblog/2009/09/22/five-minutes-with-artist-lauri.htm W Editors' Blog]</ref>
-Also in 2009 Simmons began her "Love Doll" series in which she places a life-size plastic doll in a variety of poses within a recognizable environment. <ref>[http://www.artslant.com/par/articles/show/19241</]</ref>
 Simmons starred in a feature-length film by her daughter Lena Dunham, called [[Tiny Furniture]], which was filmed in 2009 and was featured at the [[South by Southwest]] film festival in 2010. The film won the Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature.<ref>[http://tinyfurniture.com/ Tiny Furniture]</ref>
-Her work is in the permanent collections of the [[Metropolitan Museum of Art]], the [[Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum|Guggenheim Museum]], the [[Museum of Modern Art]] and the [[Whitney Museum of American Art]] in New York City; the [[Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles|Museum of Contemporary Art]] in Los Angeles; the [[Corcoran Gallery of Art]] in Washington DC; the Hara Museum in Tokyo; the Ellipse Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal and the [[Stedelijk Museum]] of Modern Art in Amsterdam, among others.<ref>Jensen, Peter, "Laurie," Tom Watt, 2010, p.20</ref>
+Her work is in the permanent collections of the [[Metropolitan Museum of Art]], the [[Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum|Guggenheim Museum]], the [[Museum of Modern Art]] and the [[Whitney Museum of American Art]] in New York City; the [[Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles|Museum of Contemporary Art]] in Los Angeles; the [[Corcoran Gallery of Art]] in Washington DC; the Hara Museum in Tokyo; the Ellipse Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal and the [[Stedelijk Museum]] of Modern Art in Amsterdam, among others.<ref>[http://www.speronewestwater.com/cgi-bin/iowa/artists/bio.html?record=109 Sperone Westwater]</ref>
 == Books ==