What’s It Really Like to Be an Artist?
When Laurie Simmons made her debut as an artist and photographer in the mid-1970s, she and other Pictures Generation artists sought to confront the patriarchal machinery of art making and the presentation of women in media. “When I picked up a camera with a group of other women, I’m not going to say it was a radical act, but we were certainly doing it in some sort of defiance of, or reaction to, a male-dominated world of painting,” she told Interview magazine in 2014.
Now, nearly 40 years later, Simmons is picking up a different kind of camera to assert her vision in another male-dominated space: film.
Last year, the artist released My Art, a feature film which she wrote and directed. It debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival last spring but begins its official theatrical run this weekend, premiering in New York on January 12 and in Los Angeles next Friday, January 19.
The film follows Ellie Shine, a single, 60-something artist and photographer whose life revolves around her work, her job teaching art at Yale, and her aging dog Bing. Shine hasn’t achieved the success of some of her art-world contemporaries—particularly her famous friend Mickey, a Marilyn Minter-type artist (Minter’s work and studio were used for the part) played by Blair Brown. Mickey lends Ellie both a camera and her home in rural New York to live and work in for the summer. Shine relocates to the house, camera in hand, and begins a new body of work, recreating iconic scenes from famous old movies—gender roles reversed—with a handful out-of-work actors she meets in the small upstate town.
For a long time, the idea of being a full-fledged filmmaker was one Simmons never thought possible: “I was always interested in film, like most artists are, I think, but I couldn’t imagine being able to do it myself,” Simmons tells artnet News. “My best friend in high school went off to film school. I always felt wistful and envious of him, but I just thought that I could never do that myself. I felt like that was a place that only guys could go.”