Arthur Simms

A Conversation and Book Launch
with Arthur Simms and Cecilia Alemani
at Karma, New York
Tuesday, December 17, 5–7 pm

Karma

549 West 26th Street
New York

Karma presents a conversation between Arthur Simms and Cecilia Alemani followed by a book launch and signing.

Arthur Simms 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, and Haiti, in addition to Australian Aboriginal belief systems. 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.

Cecilia Alemani is an Italian curator based in New York City. Since 2011, she has been the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, the public art program presented by the High Line in New York City. She is also the curator of the upcoming 12th SITE Santa Fe International, scheduled to open in June 2025. From 2020 to 2022, she served as artistic director of the 59th Venice Biennale, where she curated the acclaimed exhibition The Milk of Dreams, which was visited by over 800,000 visitors.

In recent years, she has curated several exhibitions, including Tetsuya Ishida: My Anxious Self, the first American retrospective of Japanese painter Tetsuya Ishida at Gagosian Gallery in New York (2023); Making Their Mark, the first public presentation of the Shah Garg Collection, a major exhibition showcasing the works of more than 80 of the most significant women artists from the last eight decades (548 West 22nd Street, New York, 2023; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2024); Anu Põder: Space for My Body, the first solo exhibition presented outside Estonia of works by Anu Põder, at Muzeum Susch, Switzerland (2024). She also served as artistic director of the inaugural edition of Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires in 2018 and was the curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Over the past twenty years, Alemani has developed an expertise in commissioning and producing ambitious artworks for the public space and unusual sites.

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Arthur Simms, A Totem for the High Line, 2024, installation view, A High Line Commission, New York, August 2024–July 2025. Photo by Timothy Schenck. Courtesy of the High Line.

Arthur Simms, A Totem for the High Line
on view at the High Line, New York
August 2024–July 2025

Arthur Simms creates elaborate assemblages of seemingly disparate found and personal objects that coalesce into intimate reflections on his lived experience, familial history, and spiritual reverence. Autobiographical in nature, his work incorporates trinkets, materials more likely found in a hardware store than an art supply shop, and objects gifted by friends and loved ones looking to clean house and discard what they view as “junk.” Simms pairs these elements with deeply personal belongings such as tufts of his and his wife’s hair, keys, identification cards, and letters from his late mother. He then binds these discordant pieces together by meticulously wrapping them with twine, wire, or hemp rope—the latter, a symbolic reference to his Jamaican roots—to the point of near non-recognition. Simms’ practice is grounded in his cultural heritage and dual identity as both Jamaican and American; he uses his sculpture to narrate stories of personal identity, family, spiritual and physical journeys, emotional tensions, and nostalgia for home.