Andrea Karnes in conversation with Laurie Simmons

The strange emotional pull in each picture comes from the artist’s obsessive need to make it. Calvin Tomkins, “A Doll’s House: Laurie Simmons’s Sense of Scale,” New Yorker, December 10, 2012

Artist Laurie Simmons discusses the making of the Modern’s major survey Big Camera/Little Camera with the exhibition’s curator, Modern Senior Curator Andrea Karnes. Simmons is a hands-on artist who has participated wholly with Karnes in presenting the most honest and compelling survey of a career possible. Karnes’s abiding interest in Simmons’s work is evident in this inquisitive and insightful exhibition that probes themes of gender and cultural expectations that, as presented here, are consistently relevant across time. As noted by Karnes in her catalogue essay, “Finding Jane,” “Examining key works over the span of Simmons’s career elucidates how photography became the ideal framework for her observations of archetypal Western gender roles—a topic as potent today as it was when she first began making art.”

This special presentation offers insight into Simmons’s work featured in the exhibition, her career, and the processes and premise of Big Camera/Little Camera as a collaborative effort between artist and curator.

A video recording of this lectures will be available on the Modern's Youtube.