Alette Simmons-Jiménez

Welcome!  Thanks for stopping by .  .  .  . 

Immersive / Experiential / Participatory: Mixed Media, Painting, Objects, Film & Media

My work starts conceptually at the intersection of humanity and nature.  At the core, is an exploration of the dual reality of freedom and containment, inside, outside, positive, and negative.  I use an intricate scheme of audience interaction with space, form, sound, light, color, and patterns.  All this is combined with metaphorical elements relating to this double existence of man and the metaphysical, realism and abstraction.  I propose simple expressions of truth within complex visual vocabularies, attempting to communicate ideas of interconnectivity and reciprocity, not just to one another, but to ourselves and our environment.

BIO:

Alette Simmons-Jiménez is an American artist and cultural organizer, currently based in Miami.  Simmons-Jiménez explores landscape art, interpreting the human/nature connection.  Her work navigates current climatic concerns pushing at times into supernatural vistas of what a future Earth might portray through a rigorous, multifarious, art practice.  Her work combines mixed-media painting and collage, poetry, text, sculptural assemblage, installation, and video.  

Simmons-Jiménez received a BFA from Newcomb College in New Orleans, began her studio practice in the Dominican Republic and is now based in Miami.  She has exhibited extensively in museums, galleries, and media festivals internationally and has collaborated with designers and architects to install large-scale commissions in public and private spaces.  She has had solo exhibits at the Museum of Arts & Sciences (MOAS), Daytona Beach, the MOMA Santo Domingo, Palm Beach ICA Media Room with curator Michael Rush, Inter-American Development Bank Washington D.C. with curator Susana Leval, ArtCenter South Florida, Frances Wolfson Gallery at Miami-Dade College.  Notable institutions exhibiting her work in group exhibits have been at the Chelsea Museum New York, The Mobile Museum of Art, the US Dept. of State Art in Embassies Program (Riyadh & Tegucigalpa), Casa de la Cultura-Valencia (Spain), Musée du Luxembourg, Boca Raton Museum of Art, the Appleton Museum, the Lowe Museum, MOCA N. Miami, the Frost Museum at FIU, the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, the Museum of Art Ft. Lauderdale, and others.

She is a recipient of a prestigious Knight Arts Challenge Grant, a Florida Fellowship Grant, a Florida Artists Enhancement Grant, a Miami-Dade Tourism Development Grant, a Miami-Dade Community Grant.  The artist has been designated as the first woman to exhibit video installation art in the Dominican Republic and in 1992 she was awarded the 1st Prize in Video at the XVIII Biennial in the Dominican Republic. She is listed among the creatives that helped forge the South Florida art community in the definitive books ‘Miami Contemporary Artists’ published in 2007, and ‘100+ Degrees In The Shade: A Survey of South Florida Art’ published in 2015.

In 2017, she was awarded a Grant from Oolite Arts (ArtCenter South Florida) and the Es Baluard Museum of Contemporary Art in Palma de Mallorca as a Visiting Artist.  In 2019, she was invited to Essaouira, Morocco to participate at Résidence D'Artiste Ifitry, an isolated experimental workspace created to inspire and connect artists from around the world to the unique surroundings and to each other.  The artist is currently at work on upcoming solo exhibition at the Miami International Airport CameraWorks Gallery, and an immersive installation for the Florida Biennial held at the Hollywood, Florida, Arts & Cultural Center. 

Early in her career, the artist's practice extended to professional collaborations dedicated to community building.  From 2004-2011, she founded and directed the artist-run collective Artformz Alternative with the goal to stimulate closer connections between artists and the public.  From 2013-2016, Simmons-Jiménez served on the BOD of ArtTable, Inc in New York and held the positions of Florida Chapter Chair and Programming Director.  Since 2018 she has hosted and produced Art & Company Podcast, a document of the growing South Florida art scene.