The Human Condition: The Stephen and Pamela Hootkin Collection Sept. 2014 | Page 158
ARTISTS' BIOGRAPHIES
Simonds, Charles
American; (b. 1945, New York City, NY; lives in New York City, NY)
1969 MFA Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
1967 BA University of California, Berkeley, CA
Born in New York City to two Vienna-trained psychoanalysts, Charles Simonds’
SELECTED REFERENCES:
largely site-specific work has been a continuous meditation on the idea of dwellings.
Beardsley, John. “Charles
Influenced by his mentor ceramicist James Melchert at Rutgers University, Simonds
Simonds: Inhabiting Clay.“
has used clay as his primary material throughout his career to explore how land,
(October-December 1994):
houses, and the body function as kinds of dwellings. During the 1970s, Simonds
20-[22].
gained attention with his clay Dwellings, tiny cityscapes built into the crevices
Charles Simonds: Mental
and sides of buildings. Located in various cities around the globe, each Dwelling
Earth, Growths and Smears.
housed Simonds’ imaginary civilization of “Little People.” His later series Circles
and Towers Growing extended the Dwellings concept. A sequence of twelve clay
tablets in various states of growth served to trace the life cycle of a civilization from
its genesis to its destruction. The artist’s more recent works, such as those exhibited
at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (Spain) in 2003, are suspended gestural
sculptures that continue to explore the primordial nature of the clay medium.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CHARLES SIMONDS WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION
Growing Towers
Kasl, Ronda. “Artifact and Fiction,“
In The Eloquent Object: The
Evolution of American Art in
Craft Media Since 1945, edited
by Marcia Manhart and Tom
Manhart, 240–255. Tulsa: The
Philbrook Museum of Art, 1987.
15 6
American Ceramics 11, no. 3
Exh. cat. New York: Knoedler
& Company, 2011.
Manhart, Marcia, and Tom
Manhart, eds. The Eloquent
Object: The Evolution of
American Art in Craft Media
Since 1945. Tulsa: The
Philbrook Museum, 1987.