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On the occasion of ‘Gary Simmons. Thin Ice,’ on view at our Wooster Street location in New York, and as part of the gallery’s ongoing learning initiatives, Gary Simmons has collaborated with young people from Artistic Noise, an organization committed to enriching the lives of system-impacted youth through art making.

Presented alongside the gallery buildings are four outdoor sculptures by gallery artists, and embedded in the natural landscape of Illa del Rei.

Explore new sculptures and paintings by Gary Simmons and Phyllida Barlow, celebrate in the open-air courtyard with a vinyl set paying to tribute to Lee 'Scratch' Perry, and join us in the garden for public talks with Helen Molesworth, Cauleen Smith, Miranda July, and more.

Born in New York City in 1964, Simmons has achieved wide acclaim over the past three decades for a profound and energetic practice that explores notions of race, class, social stereotypes, and politics through painting, sculpture, sound, and architectural environments.

Simmons’ work considers the influence of the past upon the present, grappling specifically with the unfixed nature of memory and the American penchant for revising or even replacing personal and collective experience. Best known for illustrative paintings in which white outlines of figures and words—20th century cartoon characters steeped in the racist traditions of minstrelsy, disappeared architectural sites, vintage film title cards, evaporating clouds of smoke, twinkling stars—are painted on chalkboard-like surfaces, then blurred and smeared by hand.

Through this signature ‘erasure’ technique, Simmons has uniquely captured the effect of history being altered while its energy continues to shape life in the present day. As the artist has stated, ‘When you attempt to erase something, there's always a trace left behind.’