The Bold Creative Universe of Laurie Simmons is Perpetually Moving Forward

Last week in New York, the pioneering, ever-inspired artist Laurie Simmons closed the curtain on an innovative exhibition titled “Deep Photos/In the Beginning” at 56 Henry. The visionary’s second presentation with the illustrious gallery invoked her signature, beloved essentials such as dollhouses and miniature objects within awe-inspiring frames—fusing sculpture, photography, and painting into an avante-garde collage of astounding form and feeling. 

This year alone, “Laurie Simmons: Autofiction,” with revelatory use of AI, culminated at YoungArts in Miami, the highly exploratory and influential film The Music of Regret debuted on The Criterion Collection, and “Laurie Simmons: Cowboys & Color Interiors” was a sweeping mini-survey at Andrew Reed Gallery in Miami. The prolific artist is currently exhibiting works alongside her husband, skillful artist Carroll Dunham, at Le Consortium, Dijon through February 25, 2025, as well as in collaboration with Jimmy Desana’s singular creative language at Mendes Wood DM Sao Paulo in February 2025. 

Whitewall had the opportunity to sit down with the tender and inventive artist to speak about her game-changing collaboration with AI and the most meaningful moments in her artistic career.

WHITEWALL: Can you tell us about your last presentation in Miami at YoungArts?

LAURIE SIMMONS: I have been working on these, I’m finally calling them paintings, and they are also AI-generated. I did not want to premiere them at a commercial gallery because my first show ever was at Artists Space, an alternative space, and it was one of my favorite shows. I thought this is a new direction, a new body of work. I feel like a young artist again, and I want this to be in a place where I am surrounded by great energy—and yes, that space is beyond.

It’s one of the most beautiful spaces I’ve ever installed. You’re not only in this beautiful stained glass box, but it’s forty feet off the ground. It’s the former Bacardi plaza that they took over and it’s important architecturally. The whole place is magical.

WW: It’s significant too because this was your first exhibition not using a camera, correct?

LS: I stopped shooting with a camera. During the pandemic things really changed. It  seems like I only pick up a camera when my son comes because he is a muse of mine. I still feel like I’m working with pictures, but I’m not looking through a camera.

Utilizing High Technology for a Low Analog Way of Working

WW: What has it been like working with AI?

LS: I think what is interesting is that I had no intention of working with AI. One of my studio managers is very interested in technology, and she’s been leading me deeper. I fancy myself as a techno-wiz-kid for someone my age. My first results looked like they came right out of my brain. I want to make it really clear, I never said, “in the style of Laurie Simmons.” I gave prompts that gave me pictures that felt like pictures I was looking for. So there was no, “I want a girl, from the 1960s, in the style of Laurie Simmons.” That’s not the game I was playing. That’s not what I was interested in. 

The most striking part for me is that when I picked up a camera in the ’70s, odd as it sounds, it felt like a radical act because photography was very sequestered then. It was in its own little ghetto in most museums. It was 130 years old or something. but my generation was using it as a way to make art in a rather irreverent way—it felt like a radical act. 

The primary thing I was interested in then was its distance—I’m not touching a painting, I’m not carving marble, this is handsoff, this is everything from painting is dead to appropriation. Pulling things from media, first generation race on television, all things you ever read about my generation, it was so important for me to keep my hands out of it and my brain in it. 

When AI became apparent I wanted to use it, I needed to make corrections, so I started, and this will get us into the technique. I started printing the images on silk and linen in order to correct the mistakes that the AI made to be more to my liking—I had to go into a very analog way. Crazily, it took the most recent technology to get me to put my hands on it. The contradiction, it’s so crazy for me that here I am doing things like embroidery and gluing and collaging—everything I rejected from the generation of women before me I’m now performing. AI got me the high low thing. The high technology got me into this low analog way of working. Very confusing, but it really has me in its grip right now.

WW: How does it feel to circle back to something that you perhaps rejected in the past? 

LS: One of the things I love about being an artist is there really are no rule books. I and every artist I know, we make our own rules, and we break our own rules. It feels more like transgressive rule breaking. It doesn’t make me feel I’m on little house on the prairie, sewing after dark by candlelight. This is where AI took me, and I’m just going with it. Again, in the end, I’m seeing the results. What I am seeing is what I want to be seeing right now. That’s really true with everything I ever make. I have to like what I am seeing in the moment and feel like I want to keep moving forward with it. 

“One of the things I love about being an artist is there really are no rule books,”

Laurie Simmons

WW: Can you describe how these works were actually made? What prompts did you provide?

LS: I have close artist friends that just blatantly refuse to accept AI. I have one friend—this is so hilarious I have to say it—when she saw the AI picture she said, “I think you should recreate those in your studio, use them as a template and make setups.” I was like, “Oh my gosh, we’re talking about two weeks of work to diligently copy an AI generated image.” One of the things that appealed to me, I’ve written screenplays and articles about other artists, writing is something that I like. I was very drawn to the structure of the AI program that I was using which is text to image prompts. 

Simply put, for people who don’t know you input a sentence and about 30 seconds later, four to eight images pop out. One of them or all of them could be amazing. As I was using the program, they started to introduce more ways I could edit it. The really interesting thing about the programs is that while we’re sleeping they’re developing. When I first started using them, there was a certain amount of interpretation. I’ve said this before, the hands looked like packages of hotdogs, the faces could look like Francis Bacon paintings, which gave me a lot of work to do. 

I had to manually bring them to where I needed them to be, to the level where I wanted them. Fast forward to December 2023, the programs have gotten too good and the faces are too perfect and everything is too real. Now, the battle is not to get everything to be better, the battle is to pull it back to that interstitial space between dull and human fact and fiction that I am really comfortable in. 

I’m constantly in dialogue or battle with the AI to get where I want it to be. Once I have these images, the question was what do I want to do with them? Did I want to print them out on pieces of paper like photographs? No. Plus, I am really tired of glass and mounting. They were so luminescent, I thought I would try them on silk and linen and started experimenting with that. It felt really liberating not to have glass between me and the picture. I thought I could glue stuff on, I could paint. The whole thing started, then I followed the lead and it took me where I needed to go. There was a breadcrumb trail for me to follow and I’m still on it. 

Scenes of Women in Interior Spaces

WW: The scenes that you constructed for the show were scenes we’ve seen before?

LS: They were subjects that I covered before. It’s basically women in interior space. I spent years shooting underwater, it was my own dolls underwater, people dressed up underwater. I’ve done portraits of myself and Penny. I just input these things all from my life. I needed an autobiographical armature because once you start inputting sentences it could be anything. I needed to have a story and I made a film that is developing along with it called “Autofiction the Movie.” I can add chapters to it which helped me organize my thoughts about the so-called paintings.

WW: What has it been like to look at the works you originally created, and not recreated in AI, but reimagined? 

LS: It feels seamless. That’s why I got hooked on it, it feels like a seamless extension of my work. When I first started working with the images I was very bashful about showing them to people. People were confused that it was AI because it looked like a continuation of everything I’ve done. It looked like works that I had created in the studio. I don’t know how long I would’ve fought with AI to get what I wanted, but there was some instant gratification. I felt a connection to that way of working, and again people say to me ‘are you an AI artist now?’ No, this is a new tool, the same way a camera was, and a xerox machine), or photoshop, or any of the things— color film, black and white film, video, any of the things I’ve incorporated. 

The difference is people are terrified of AI—people don’t understand it. I don’t pretend to, although I’m fully immersed in the dialogue and conversation around it. When I picked up a camera I had gone to art school, walked out of photo class, didn’t think it was art.  I picked up a camera a few years out of art school, and I realized I knew nothing about the history of photography. The same time I was learning how to use a camera, I immersed myself in that history. Which was, as I said, only 130-years-old, it wasn’t like learning the history of painting in a minute. 

But, the dialogue around AI has been changing daily, you could get a room of the greatest philosophers, scientists, minds of our time, and everyone is going to have a different take of whether AI would become ascension—whether it’s the end of the world, the beginning of the new world, or nothing at all. The dialogue, politically, philosophically, technically, I’m fully immersed in because that’s my responsibility. Not that I can give you an explanation of how it works and how it’s changing, but I’m not playing it in an ignorant way, I’m really trying to keep up.

“People were confused that it was AI because it looked like a continuation of everything I’ve done,”

Laurie Simmons

WW: You’re allowed—you’re an artist. You don’t feel a responsibility to communicate how it works to others, do you?

LS: People are so terrified, so frightened, and so curious. The more I know, the more comfortable I feel.

WW: I think both of those can be true at the same time.

LS: I’m glad you said I don’t have a responsibility to explain.

Artists Always Find a Way

WW: What do you think AI is or has the capability to be?

LS: I think it is a tool for an artist. It’s great if you have an idea. It’s great for me because I have forty years of language that already exists that I just tack it on to. I don’t think we know what’s going to happen, in terms of art. It’s a literary conversation, it’s a music conversation, it’s a writer’s conversation, it’s an artist’s conversation—and nobody really knows. I love to think about the potential, let’s get a big overview going here and let’s say wouldn’t it be amazing if it has the potential to cure cancer. I think we just don’t know, and someone who has taught for many years, and watched the birth of the digital age, and watched the transition of photography to analog, to digital, I can see in the last few years how many of my students wanted to shoot on film. 

The thing about being an artist in general, there are always these reactions, repercussions, and paths that are taken that we cannot predict. A lot of people like to talk about this being the end of artists, I see from comments on my instagram people are very hostile to this. To quote someone on my instagram, they said, ‘This is clown stuff’ and ‘The end of art’. Artist’s always find a way, and I’m really interested to see how many people use this as a tool and how many people reject it. It’s ultimately going to push art in a different direction, but not necessarily because people are using it. 

“The thing about being an artist in general, there are always these reactions, repercussions, and paths that are taken that we cannot predict,”

Laurie Simmons

WW: When you are creating these AI pictures, and you are printing them, sewing and collaging, and gluing things on to correct certain mistakes, that is an emotional and intuitive thing that you are offering that it can’t make up for. I am also really hopeful for AI as a tool. 

LS: With the younger artists who were there for YoungArts, we had a really interesting conversation about AI. A lot of young artists were taking issue with the fact that with the data sets, there is so much information now, so of course they are stealing from artists. There are millions of these artists’ work in these data sets. One young woman kept asking, ‘well how do you feel about that, how do you feel about the fact that other peoples art is in there, and you are stealing other peoples art.’ Well, what I am making looks like my art. I think the editing process is all important, it always has been for me, out of a thousand pictures that are AI-generated or Laurie Simmons generated, the one that I pick is the right one, and then I run with it. 

But we had realistic conversations like, wouldn’t it be great if there was legislation where an artist could opt out of being in the data set. It feels very far away that anyone could agree on any kind of legislation. 

WW: It’s great that you are working with it, regardless of whether you have the answers or not.

LS: The other interesting thing is nobody knew until I told people who came into the show. It’s not AI identifiable. But then I took the quiz in the New York Times about which faces were real and which faces were AI generated and I flunked. 

The other kind of work that I am doing are these boxes I’ve been working on all through the pandemic, very few people have seen them. I have this incredible organized prop collection—boxes of hot dogs, plastic irons, miniature perfume bottles, superheroes.I love the organization of it and I love the idea of being able to go back and use it in a photograph. But during the pandemic I began to suddenly feel really weighed down by it and I started this group of work called Deep Photos. I made these frames that are deeper than my usual frames and the actual objects are in there. 

They are being recycled out of my life and into my work—the notion of Swedish Death Cleansing. It’s different from the Marie Kondo stuff, where, does this spark joy, if not throw it out. It’s more like going through the course of your life and as you get older getting rid of things, gradually and slowly, giving them away, scaling them down, so that by the time you check out of this world you are down to like four things and you are not leaving a hundred dumpsters full of stuff to your friends, kids, or relatives. 

It was the way we all felt during the pandemic, a time when it was so uncertain and scary, but also amazing to not have to go anywhere, and it felt like a time to divest of so much, emotionally, physically. It just felt like a time of potential, of starting over, was really there. I have half the amount of props on my shelves than I used to and they all have been cycled into these things.

WW: How does that feel to step back and see them in a different way, and them not physically be there anymore?

LS: I am having real separation anxiety from the props. Between the AI works, which I loosely call paintings, and the boxes, which I call Deep Photos, I am understanding much more. I can always make another photograph even if the edition is sold out. I can make a photo and hang it on my wall and look at it. There is never this permanent goodbye. It’s a new way of being an artist that feels like an old way of being an artist, which is you make things and they go away. 

“Between the AI works, which I loosely call paintings, and the boxes, which I call Deep Photos, I am understanding much more,”

Laurie Simmons

WW: How would you describe that feeling, is it a sense of longing, is it refreshing?

LS: It’s like separation anxiety, but I am new to that game of letting things go. I am not making things to sell it, I’ve never been that person, maybe if there is an artist who is just making things to sell things maybe it’s like good riddance, go away. That’s not my life, but maybe for some people it is a different story.

Past and Present Works Come Together 

WW: Let’s talk about “Cowboys & Color Interiors” at Andrew Reed. 

LS: It’s the first color series I made in the late ’70s. Andrew visited the studio, it was really exciting to work with him. We went through lots of options for what to show, that is what I was in the mood to show, and he was excited about it. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me, but in Miami is my very latest work and my very first work. It feels like it happened accidentally. 

For me, it was a pretty incredible experience to make those connections. Not only to get a little nostalgic about what I’ve done, and how far I’ve come in terms of my work, but to have it physically in the two gallery spaces right there. It was a little bit of whiplash. To think about everything that came between, but to find the threads of that work, and so much of that work is in the newest work. That was a really interesting experience.

Art Focused on Gender and the Progression of our Definitions 

WW: How has your consideration of gender norms evolved or changed, or has it very much stayed the same? 

LS: The culture and yes, my work, is still very much about gender and the progression of our definition of it. It’s a gift the way things have changed. It’s a gift to me as an artist because when I first bit into that subject, and it’s still my subject, I was all about the way I grew up. Blue is for boys and pink is for girls. What about that? That examination of gender roles, and how strict they were when I grew up, just to put it super simply, and here we are getting through the first quarter of the 21st century and the definition of gender in our country, in our world, in my family, in our life has changed so much.

I feel this stuff is coming at me so fast, providing me with such fertile territory and providing me with so much imagery that I can’t even stay ahead of it. All the changes, all the politics, all the heartache, all the things I’m invested in, having a trans child. Having a child who is smack dabbed in the center culture in the way that Lena is with her work. These have been my greatest gifts as an artist because it forces me to keep looking ahead and keep my eyes open. 

There is one image in the show, I think it’s called Beachball. I just kept working on this character, and the character felt really comfortable and familiar to me. After several passes of editing, it was so clearly a trans child to me, and that was what was making me feel comfortable, and that’s where it was going. Yes, things have changed, they are changing all the time. It’s not easy, there is a lot of heartache involved, especially as a mother of a trans child, there is a lot of fear. But also it has kept me on my toes in terms of what I am interested in, and a kind of imagery that I can produce around all these feelings and issues and attitudes.

WW: Are there new types of ideas about gender that you are exploring in new and different ways, aside from AI?

LS: I think the whole notion of fluidity, you just have to go out. My best friend—I remember the first time I met him was on the A train in 1973. He was wearing khaki pants and a white shirt, a white panama hat, and a tiny little rhinestone necklace. The whole thing was so beautiful to me. That’s a small gesture that I still think about today, all these years later. That kind of fluidity, that kind of fearlessness, that kind of fashion, in music, in art. Unless you’ve got your head in the sand, that’s gotta permutate the look of everything. The way things look is really big for me. It’s how the ideas come in and how they translate into the visual. The degree to which artists decide that you could either have your eyes on it, or your brain in it, or your heart in it—that’s a really personal choice.

“Music of Regret” Debuts on Criterion

WW: The last topic I would love to loop back to is Music of Regret.

LS: The Music of Regret is a three act musical with puppets and dolls. The amazing thing is so many people are asking me about the Barbie movie, and how I feel about dolls being such a huge part of the conversation. I’m like, well, I started that conversation forty years ago. I’m really excited to hear what everyone has to say about it. A lot of what people have to say about it we already said twenty years ago. But in terms of having The Music of Regret in the Criterion Channel, that’s a dream come true.

WW: What do you have to say about the Barbie movie?

LS: I am so proud of Greta Gerwig and this breaking not one glass ceiling, but a hundred glass ceilings to get there. We’re used to it with Marvel movies and boy subjects, but the fact that this movie, that looked this way, this subject, could do that is really awesome. The fact that I went to see it, I didn’t wear pink like a lot of my friends did, I didn’t go with a huge group of women, but the fact that is was kind of a uniter, that women were having a really great time with it, at a time when it’s way more fun think about the Barbie Movie than Roe V Wade being overturned. It was really like, what a feat. I also have a publisher who did a story of the dollhouse I made in 2001, who said he had on good authority that the set designers were influenced by Kaleidoscope House. That for me was like, ‘wow.’ To influence it visually in any way, that’s what any artist wants to hear.

WW: To circle back to The Music of Regret, it really captures that raw emotion, the vulnerability, and gender of all of these topics that you explored years ago. How does it feel to revisit this?

LS: It is a dream come true. It feels like, as artists, we have this built in defense mechanism which is that we won’t be understood in our own moment and there is a lot of self protection built into that. It’s not fun to really be understood after you die, that’s not a fun one to think about, happens to many people. But we are used to the idea that things won’t be accepted, understood, given the green light, or the award show statue in their time. We’re used to that, we play the long game. We want to be out ahead of the culture, that’s something that we need to be. We’re not narrating things as they’re going along. 

I think the fact that I made it in 2006, I didn’t even know how long to make it, I made it 45 minutes long. Too long to be a short, too short to be a feature. I didn’t know what I was doing, I just had amazing people like Meryl Streep and Ed Lockman. I made the movie I wanted to make. I’ve always been really proud of it, but it’s not like I was waiting for it to get its due. I thought that’s an artwork I made. So it’s really thrilling for me to have that kind of acknowledgement now. It’s not something I was expecting. I think if you’re making a feature in the regular commercial movie world, you want attention on that feature immediately, you want to go to Sundance, you want to get an award, you want to be singled out right away. Artist’s don’t work that way when they make films.

WW: Watching it today on Criterion, does that change the way you think about your own emotions? 

LS: Initially I was playing around with Hollywood tropes like Douglas Sirk, and even one of my favorite filmmakers, Todd Haynes. I was so immersed in ideas of Hollywood, Hollywood musicals, and the American Songbook, there was so much that I was taking from the past, that was already part of an almost universal vernacular of love and loss. 

Those things were personal in some sense but also general in some sense. Those things are still really true for me. I wasn’t making that movie from a personal position of regret in love, but a more distanced, nuanced position of having grown up and being obsessed with movies. I feel I am really proud of that as an artwork. 

When we premiered at MoMA, spoiler alert, the two puppet fathers talk about the puppet son that committed suicide and they sing a song together. I wrote the lyrics and Michael wrote the music. People in the audience were crying. That was one of the most surreal and exciting moments of my life because my work has always been served by puppets, mannequins, and dolls, but the fact that I can translate that to film. I don’t know how people feel when they are in front of my artworks, but I was in a theater where I could literally see and hear people wiping the tears away. I will never recover from that. 

“I don’t know how people feel when they are in front of my artworks, but I was in a theater where I could literally see and hear people wiping the tears away. I will never recover from that,”

Laurie Simmons

One of the interesting things about having the show in Miami and at Andrew Reed was that so many people came in and said, “These photos look so fresh, they look like you just made them.” And I made them in 1978. I want to make work that I feel someone can look at in a hundred years and feel something about. I am not saying that’s the hallmark of great art because people feel what they feel. Even in my own work, forty years of art making, my own work goes in and out of style with me. I’m like, I don’t want to look at that, I don’t want to think about it, that series, I don’t know what I was thinking. And then ten years later I will decide it’s one of the best things I ever did. 

We are so influenced by our own tastes, and concerns, and ideas are so influenced by what’s around us. 

Art, Activism, and Alliance in 2024

WW: What else are you up to in 2024? Are you hopeful for this year?

LS: There is a looming election. I am on the verge of getting involved, I’ve always been an activist, but I am moving things over to working much more with things that are going on in transgender legislation. I had a podcast come out yesterday—the first time my husband and I ever did a podcast together. We have a conversation about us being together for forty years and what that is like for two artists. Coincidentally, we are having a show together at the Consortium Museum. We’ve never done that before, we’ve always shied away from doing things together. We are not a vaudeville act and we are both really excited about that.

WW: Existing works, new works, or both?

LS: It will be a retrospective, weaving our works together. Then I am having a show at Mendes Wood Gallery. I am sure there is something else big that I am doing… I have so many things on my plate.