Xaviera Simmons

Xaviera Simmons (born 1974, in New York, New York) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores race, power, history, language, landscape, and the social construction of American identity. Working across photography, performance, video, sound, sculpture, and installation, Simmons examines visibility, citizenship, political memory, and the layered histories embedded in public and institutional space through conceptual image-making, archival inquiry, and materially varied forms.  Simmons received a BFA from Bard College in 2004 and also studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Joseph Beuys Research Project in Düsseldorf. Her work often engages archives, political action, Blackness, language, and social history, using staged and documentary photography, performance, installation, and text to consider how race, capital, and ideology shape the ways bodies move through landscape, civic life, and historical narrative. MoMA materials around her Archive as Impetus project especially emphasize her sustained engagement with institutional history, political gesture, and the archive as a living site of struggle.  Her work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and major international exhibitions and institutional programs. Her work is held in collections including MoMA and the Guggenheim. Xaviera Simmons lives and works in New York.