Untitled (Woman’s Head)

“They’re not specific to a feminist critique of a housewife in the 1960s but a generalized memory of something that seemed sweet and terrifying and abstract and whitewashed.”

—Laurie Simmons

Laurie Simmons has been dealing issues of women in interior spaces (the space of the mind, the home, and the community) since the mid-1970s. Her seminal early work was some of the first to use set-up photography to create images with intensely psychological subtexts and forcefully feminist content. The 1950s-style constructed interiors used dolls, dollhouse furnishings, miniature props, postcards, interior decoration books, pamphlets and magazines to create images that questioned female stereotypes and American clichés with humor and charm. Simmons has exhibited internationally for forty years and has work in the collections of the International Center of Photography, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Tate, the Stedelijk Museum, among many other museums.