Biography

Ross Simonini is an artist working in visual art, literature, interview and music. His approach to paintings, drawings and sculptures addresses his relationship with the body and cultural paradigms of health. He often paints with four limbs to build new neural pathways and uses dietary pigments and medicinal herbs as his primary media.

Simonini’s wall installation Anxiety Napkins was presented at Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017). His first novel, The Book of Formation (Melville House, 2017), is told in eight interviews and will be accompanied by a parallel exhibition exploring the book’s philosophies of empathy and personality transformation. Dialogue is an essential part of his artistic process, and he regularly contributes interviews to frieze, Art in America, Interview and The Believer, a literary magazine he has edited for a decade. In September 2016, Simonini was the podcaster-in-residence at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and produced an eight-episode audio documentary/collage about art and the unknown.

Simonini has performed with the band and art project NewVillager at the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh and Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, among others. Both NewVillager and another of his musical projects, Davenport, will be releasing new music in 2017, including a commission from the LA Contemporary Dance Company.

He is an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where he designs and teaches seminars on spoken forms of literature and experimental writing processes. He received degrees in music, physics and writing from the University of California and Bennington College, US.

Born in San Rafael, US, he lives and works in New York and Muir Beach, US.

This person was part of Sharjah Biennial 13.

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