BmoreArt

On entering the gallery, dominant hues of vermillion and cobalt blue set the visual temperature. It is a kaleidoscope of vivid primary colors softened by the delicate appliques of white and blue lace and the earthy browns of bark cloth. The effect is psychedelic, and with sustained attention—a sitting, a waiting—Simmons’ art might do the healing work that plant medicine promises in our time (it may or may not be helpful to know that Simmons experimented with mescaline and other hallucinogens as a young man). 

As you would with a line or verse of poetry, take the room in slowly. Sit with the quartet, “An Uphill Climb,” a large-scale color saturated palette of thick brushwork and errant lines that opens into streams of meandering reds and lakes of sky blue. Symbol-heavy indigenous mud cloth converses with Ankara fabric, a colonial marketing marvel now synonymous with modern African fashion. 

In my reading, the leaf green ground and splashes are both literal color and endangered forest, metaphor and metonym for capitalism and an allusive index of our ecological crises. Up is down, as the bold green tones on the left panels resolve into muted expanses of yellow on the right. Make of this what you will. Sunny hope, it is not. Presence though. A report from a witness. Strong pan-African hues could lead to one kind of a reading, but an earth-centered one is more dominant for me, a missive from nature and the inner world of the artist.

The curator’s wall text tells us that Simmons’ practice “draws out commonalities across temporal, linguistic, and spatial boundaries,” a disposition rooted in the complexities of his own layered identities.

It is a helpful handle for a composed walk through the show. But how about an untamed reading from a wild hearted black poet, or unexpected conjunctions for the spiritual seeker? In this vein, Simmons’ naming of his process is more priestly than scholarly, more shamanic than secular: “It’s important for me to access Spirit,” he says, “and to try to transmit that. I don’t know how successful I am but that’s my intention. I sit in silence and paint and try to be an open conduit for whatever comes.”

That might be our instruction as we circle the show.

James Cavello’s curation is a richly annotated, viewer-centric offering of clues and keys for a first-time viewer of Simmons’ work, who has been painting since the 1990’s after he left a career in social work. The paintings on view in The Journey to Everything date from 2021 – 2024, yet there is a retrospective depth to the curation that allows for a peering into what animates the artist’s process. 

Two masks from Burkina Faso add an energetic frisson to the works on display and stand as sentinels and context for the art: a purple-red Bwa buffalo mask and a raffia and wooden sculpture ensemble from the Mossi. Cavello incorporated these pieces with the artist’s help. He explains, “You immediately realize how importantly the African works play into Danny’s consciousness. How the energy is contained. It’s a great dialogue you can almost feel, between Danny and the African works.” 

My one quibble here would be the absence of active movement important for full appreciation of the power of the masks. They tend to stand inert in museums. A video of a performance would have been a significant and helpful addition to the curation, lending a kinesthetic presence to the collages. Without the masks in motion, their power is static and limits the aura they could provide for a richer and fuller meaning of Spirit. 

As Simmons declared, African art is a gateway to Spirit. He has amassed a collection of approximately 1500 pieces in his home, which serve as guides, inspiration, and muse as he works daily, prolifically. In this, he is both heir and restorer of the original spiritual promise of abstract art, a vital preoccupation for the artists of the early 20th century.

The seminal motif in Simmons’ brushwork, the dot, could stand in as a metonym for his coming into his own as an abstract artist. “It was the beginning of how I could release the figure,” he says. As he transitioned from figurative painting, he was particularly drawn to Wilfredo Lam, a surrealist and contemporary of Picasso and Breton’s, who for Simmons, retained an authentic African content in his art. Lam himself was influenced by the Haitian artist, Hector Hippolyte (1894-1948), a third generation vodou priest. And the dot, like the indigenous art that inspires Simmons, can be both adornment and spiritual symbol. 

To help us connect to Simmons’ work, two Nkisi figures from the Congo offer a visual vocabulary, highlighting the play of visibility and opacity, or better yet, of revelation and concealment, terms that are intrinsic to the aesthetics of traditional African art and the substance of its spiritual drama. A small painting, “I Like His Hat,” reiterates this way of seeing. In this collage, black and white lace and latticework obscure faces cocooned by Simmons’ signature painted dots. Patterned circles on Ankara fabric, and round felt cutouts for a carapace might be an invitation to linger and look deeper for what is not seen, or what is only partially visible. Simmons has suggested that the cut outs of faces also serve as gateways into the works for viewers who might have difficulty with abstraction.

It is important to understand that Nkisi figures are owned by entire communities to preserve the health and wellbeing of their members. The ferocity of their forms belies their function—to relieve suffering and to help the sick. The medicine, sequestered inside the figure, is released by the metal as it is hammered in, accompanied with song. Its workings are mysterious, as healing of the sick can be.

The visual power of the nails on the surface of the sculptures accrues over time and is communal and cumulative. An effect echoed in the dotted landscapes of the painting, “Nappy Headed Witches and Grandma’s Duppy.” Here, Simmons delivers a beautifully executed panegyric to the ancestors who we may not see but who take on materiality in and through us. 

“I was trying to say, we are guided by ancestral spirits. We have a lot of power, and it comes from someplace else,” Simmons exhorts. “Our religions are based on accessing power and Spirit. And it comes from your grandma.”

I see in the three-angled object suspended in the center of the canvas, a tracing of the journey of slave ships between Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean, dispersing Africa’s spiritual wealth that continues to give life to the Black experience. The painting’s composition is a tripartite landscape replete with solid dots in the top and bottom thirds, denoting sky and earth and a middle realm with translucent dottings on a red horizon. Three figures hover in this space, one of which is a sepia and indigo toned image of a grandmother. The “Nappy Headed Witches” on either side of her are crowned with hair of luxurious neon yellow and cobalt blue lacework. Unevenly shaped blue tiles float on the bottom of the canvas, like the road the dead walk on, through water, through fire, loving us to strength and wholeness. 

Like “Nappy Headed Witches”, “Extended Family” evokes the themes of familial inheritance and the passing down of artistic craft and technique. A deep indigo piece is set in the center of quilted cutouts of Ankara with stitching that is sometimes visible and crisscrossed. Simmons’ reappropriation of the indigeneity of Indonesian batiks from Dutch colonial plunder extends the familial beyond local and national and ethnic boundaries. Patterns, geometric symbols, esoteric and hidden meanings become available for multiple readings and interpretations.

Take “Long Way Home” a work of two canvases connected by a bridge of Ankara cloth featuring organic and geometric marking, curlicues and paisleys. The floating dots against a black background suggest telescopic images of the universe as it pulses with stars and gasses and planets, old worlds and new worlds moving through time, colliding and creating a plethora of fantastic forms and new seeds for life. All of it bridged by technology and the handiwork of human ingenuity, like the secret lore hidden in quilts, or the ancient pyramids of Egypt alluded to by the triangular shapes in the center of the bridge. 

Moving between boundaries is a major theme in the triptych comprising “Homeward Bound,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Whole Lotta Bluz.” Water abounds, as do monuments, animal forms and abstract lines and shapes. It is the strongest allusion to journeying in the show, evoking geographical terrains, landscapes, and bodies of water. The middle painting, “Take the Long Way Home,” with its downward flow of fabric pushes past an imaginary frame, like an unbounded river making its way through towns and cities, erasing artificial borders and forging new centers of cultural fomentation and rebirth.

If Simmons’ art is doing the reparative work of remembering souls lost in watery depths on their attempts at crossing arbitrary borders, this triptych is both memorial and protest.

Simmons’ process is guided by a contemplative, meditative conversation with the materials as his paintings take shape. “The painting develops like I’m building something. They never happen in one sitting,” he says. “I’ll do the beginning of a painting, and I’ll stare at it. They are intuitive and spiritual. They talk. They say, ‘Danny you got to do this.’ There is a conversation always going on with me and the piece.”

It is like the patience a poem demands, the listening, the waiting for the right word, the prayer that turns precision to beauty and to truth. It brings a visual and conceptual balance to Simmons’ collages that is palpable and fulsome. And then, there’s the rhythm and rhyme of the dots, providing refrains and choruses across various canvases. 

I have always understood the intention of the Abstract Expressionists to elicit emotional resonance from the viewer as a hit or miss proposal. It can require, I sometimes fear, more mental calisthenics than feeling and empathy. The commensurability of abstraction and Spirit, the potential for reciprocity and communion, which the modernist artists appropriated but did not sufficiently acknowledge is what I experienced in Simmons’ work. 

Perhaps Spirit is a synonym for art’s reparative promise, and Simmons is reclaiming its communal character, inspired by the abstraction in African art he has said enabled him to locate himself in art’s history. Yet taking in these works, very present though reverent sources of beauty and power, I heard this show asking, “What songs will you sing now?”