Arthur Simms

LOK. Arthur Simms, 2024
Paper, thread, pencil, post cards, glue
35 1/2 x 26 1/4 inches (90.17 x 66.68 cm)
Courtesy of the artist, Karma, and Martos Gallery

Selected by Cecilia Alemani

Arthur Simms (b. 1961, Saint Andrew, Jamaica) is an artist based in Staten Island, New York, whose human-scale assemblage sculptures radiate with poeticism and spirituality. Simms’s sculptures are sourced from found and natural materials and are often bound with rope or wire. Likewise, his work binds together traditions and modern art historical trajectories: Surrealism’s uses of automatism and disjunction, as well as its reliance on the unconscious, are merged with the folk cultures of Jamaica, America, Australian Aboriginal Art, Haitian and African as well as him crossing gender lines by using domestic craft techniques of sewing and embroidery. The resulting entanglements, constructed from materials such as bedsprings, empty bottles, bicycles, and worn-out toys, resonate with narratives of belonging, playfulness, and psychic energy. Simms’s sculpture, rather than feeling like an intervention in space, seems to appear spontaneously, as if by magic, like a creation preordained. 

Simms’s work was included in the Kingston Biennial in 2022, the Venice Biennale in 2019, and the inaugural Jamaica Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001. Simms’s site-specific installations include a floating sculpture displayed on Staten Island’s waterfront in 2018 and a large-scale work in Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York in 1994. His work is held in the collections of the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Museum Brandhorst, Germany; Neuberger Museum of Art, Harrison, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, among others.