Curator, Roxana Marcoci: Gary Simmons sees his chalkboards, he says, as “a surface for learning and unlearning, teaching and unteaching.” As part of our educational environment, he feels that they play a powerful role in the way our memories are constructed. The work on this wall is from his Erasure series, partly inspired by one of his early studios that had previously been a classroom in a Manhattan school building. The studio still had chalkboards in it.
Artist, Gary Simmons: I was looking for a kind of loaded object, and the chalkboard became the obvious object for me. And it sort of just hit me like a club on the head one day. And so, I started these chalkboard pieces.
Roxana Marcoci: Simmons had thought about making a film and started to watch movies considered appropriate for children, such as Dumbo and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Gary Simmons: And I thought the most interesting thing to attack would be cartoons. Because cartoons were the first kind of images where stereotypes were kind of implanted. Where a crow or a frog or something would stand in place of a black figure. And this was a form of humor for a child.
So, I started doing these drawings on the chalkboard surface itself. And then started trying to smudge or erase the kind of stereotype that was being presented there.
Roxana Marcoci: This work is from a 1993 series using cartoon characters from the 1930s and 40s. They have traits that embody racial stereotypes, such as wide-open eyes, thick lips and prominent teeth.
Simmons feels that erasing violent or offensive images is in itself an act of empowerment. Yet the images never fully disappear. We, the viewers, fill in what is unclear or missing for ourselves. The power of Simmons’s erasures comes from what we choose to remember.