About
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Sheri Simons is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, drawing, mapping, and interactive urban projects. Her work reflects the influences from her upbringing around Detroit, Michigan where she embraced the grand and fragile dream of machine culture. She focuses on creating a hybrid staging of theatre and machine, mapped through drawing and sculpture using common industrial materials such as motors, electronics, wood, paper, and rubber.
Simons’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, and South America. Exhibitions in solo and group exhibitions include the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (“Big Deal”), Contemporary Jewish Museum (“Contraption”), Southern Exposure Gallery (“Sayonara”), and Catharine Clark Gallery (“Aural Sex”, “Strange Architecture”) in San Francisco, the Fukushima Biennale, Japan, the Kansas City Art Institute, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, the Cranbrook Museum, Michigan, and the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, Center for Cultural Innovation, Los Angeles, and the Michigan Council for the Arts. Residencies have included the Prelinger Library, San Francisco, Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Colorado, and Artpark in New York. She was given 1-6 month residencies at the Siena Art Institute in Italy, the Japan-US Friendship Commission/NEA in Japan, Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo, and ZK/U: Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in Berlin. Several public art commissions in California and Washington have created the opportunity for her to interact with diverse communities through open-ended narrative imagery in libraries and state buildings. Recently, she has developed projects at residencies in Europe (b-Tour Festival, Berlin) and Japan that concentrate on mapping, walking, and way finding in an urban landscape for groups and individuals. Simons holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and a BFA from the University of Michigan School of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is a professor emerita at California State University, Chico where she shared the position of head of Sculpture. She lives in Northern California. |