Simmons incorporated Klu Klux Klan iconography into a number of installations early in his career, such as “Klan Gate,” from 1992, making pointed implications about how white supremacy is embedded into society. He’s warped facsimiles of familiar classroom objects with the symbols of white supremacy to show how early such prejudices can take root - a flagpole with its flag replaced by dangling nooses, or a children-sized Klu Klux Klan robes hung up on a small coat rack. In his “Erasure” series, he’s produced chalk drawings of minstrel-inspired cartoon characters, which he wipes and smudges to ghostly effect, like memories that can’t be fully expunged. Since the late 1980s, Simmons has worked prolifically in a wide range of mediums to illustrate how racism is baked into American life and visual culture. “So many of us in the art world today are benefiting from that space… It feels like a very important moment to take a step back and think about how we got here, and who helped us get here.” “(Simmons) helped create the space for really challenging critical, conceptual art that addresses race,” said Morales, chief curator at the museum, in a video interview. Simmons displayed gold-plated sneakers in front of a police height chart at the 1993 Whitney Biennial, a time when media outlets were associating sneaker culture - and the Black youth participating in it - with criminality. A show of this magnitude is long overdue for Simmons, according to curators René Morales and Jadine Collingwood - it’s his first comprehensive museum show in 21 years. “Lineup” is just one of the breakout works featured in the sweeping retrospective “Gary Simmons: Public Enemy,” which is currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago before traveling to the Pérez Art Museum in Miami later this year. Decades later, the provocative installation is still all too relevant in a society where police and civilians make deadly decisions based on the clothes worn by Black youth. Who did gallerygoers picture wearing them, and why? “Lineup” made implicit the stereotyping of young Black men, but it also made viewers complicit in their own assumptions. The shoes were familiar brands - a mix of Nike, Adidas and Reebok - but devoid of human presence. Thirty years ago, the conceptual artist Gary Simmons arranged eight pairs of gold-plated basketball sneakers in front of the minimal black lines of a police height chart, screenprinted on the walls of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
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