Danny Simmons's Page

Danny Simmons is an artist as much as he is a public impresario. His art is set in the context of the 80s, 90s and going forward into the 21st Century. His public persona is the product of historical facts across physical, intellectual and spiritual boundaries – an exploration of new possibilities and existing tensions in his personal life and in the collective arena.

Simmons went through a gradual metamorphosis beginning in the 80s, when his search for a medium to channel his creative self was primordial. He deliberately studied modernist ideas and technique, particularly those of Wilfredo Lam, whose black Afro-Chinese-Cuban heritage was an attractive and a personally meaningful point of reference. Also, the surrealists of the likes of Andre Breton and Salvador Dali had a strong appeal in form and content, and as a medium to expressing psychedelic personal experiences during the fuming drug culture in the 80s. That period and the speculative contemporary art market of the times inspired his novel, Three Days As the Crow Flies.

Chairman New York Stay Council on the Arts