Timmy Simonds
Teachers Bouquets
May 5th - June 6th
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 5th (6-8pm)

Teaching is not just a subject in Timmy Simonds’s work; it is almost his medium. In his hands, pedagogy becomes material: a sound, a choreography, an architecture, a social relation.

I am reminded of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Jacques Rancière’s The Philosopher and His Poor , both of which challenge conventional hierarchies of teaching and learning. For Freire, one must move away from what he famously calls “banking education,” in which knowledge is deposited into passive students and schools become factories reproducing obedience and social hierarchy. For Rancière, the task is not simply to help the poor but to learn from them as the first imperative, and to recognize forms of intelligence and knowledge that already exist outside institutional authority. In both thinkers, teaching is never neutral; it is entangled with power, discipline, and the shaping of subjects.

This may be where Simonds’s work begins: at the unstable threshold between care and control, nurture and discipline, altruism and domination.

The Teachers Bouquet works are telling in this regard. Bouquets are arrangements, but also offerings or ceremonial gifts. They collapse organic growth with social ritual. Flowers become pedagogical symbols with all the precarity of cultivation, care, reward, and mourning, constantly provisioned, decaying, and renewing. The process of their making is itself a form of caretaking; slow, repetitive, and dependent on attendance. They demand observation and time. 

This sense of fragility extends across his material vocabulary more broadly: water, paper, fabric, salad greens, bleached organic matter, thin ribbons moving with air. These are delicate and unstable materials that require tending. They wilt, shift, and decay, often clashing and intertwining with harder materials like metal wire. That juxtaposition seems central to Simonds’s thinking: the soft and perishable set against the rigid and disciplinary; nurture entangled with structure.

Bottles and Diaries of Routine Ghosts (2017-), now renamed Broken Vine (2026), brings these tensions into sharper focus. Grown from seed and trained toward the ceiling of Simonds’s studio between 2017 and 2018, the vines carry with them the memory of that original architecture.  Suspended along chains in syncopated intervals, like notes on a page, they appear at once guided and restrained. The chains introduce an industrial and disciplinary register into Simonds’s otherwise fragile and organic world: they connect, bind, suspend, and weigh down. In the context of teaching, they evoke the invisible structures that organize bodies and behaviors, like habits drilled through repetition and discipline internalized until it becomes second nature. The “ghosts” of the title suggest that such routines outlive their immediate context, lingering as afterimages of authority or learned behaviors that persist even after the teacher or institution has disappeared.

However, Simonds’s chains are not purely punitive. Like ribbons or fabric in other works, they drape and sway. They can appear decorative, even elegant, while retaining their latent hardness and violence. That ambiguity feels important: pedagogy in his work is never simply liberatory or oppressive. It is a site where care and coercion, freedom and conditioning, ritual and discipline remain inseparable.

The leaves in Broken Vine have now dried and orange-hardened into a new rigidity. In some places, their inflexibility seems to brace the chain even as the chain pulls them downward. The work ghosts the architecture where they were grown, retaining its height and measure while seeking new forms through which to inhabit each new site. 

In Broken Vine, teaching appears less as the transmission of knowledge than as the production of rhythms, habits, and forms of relation that inhabit the body long after the lesson ends. The work seems to ask what remains once content is forgotten: the choreography of obedience, the rituals of care, and the spectres of routines that continue to shape us.

The works in Teachers Bouquets are not static objects so much as ongoing situations. Time alters the works and their meanings. Simonds’s practice remains attentive to these changes, allowing each manifestation to become its own lesson in contingency. In Simonds’s work, pedagogy is never neutral. It is tender and disciplinary, formative and fragile. His art does not resolve these contradictions. It stages them.

During the exhibition the gallery will be hosting several events including a demo of Not I, a tool he uses to meet with groups of teachers.

About Timmy Simonds: (Bio): 

Timmy Simonds (b. 1989) is an artist living in New York City. He teaches regularly at Pratt Institute between art and writing. His work has appeared as installations, teaching-tools, radio broadcasts, and meetings with different teacher communities. His reflections on teaching have also been the focus of shows he’s curated (Airhead, P.P.O.W. 2024) and his writing (Prepositions, co-authored with Aaron Lehman, Montez Press, 2024). Since 2018, he’s broadcast numerous projects on Montez Press Radio and Wave Farm’s WGXC, using radio as a medium to lead participatory exercises, reflect on communication, and as a platform for his students. 

Other institutions and galleries that have shared or supported his work include Emily Harvey Foundation, Dia Art Foundation, Recess, Cathouse Proper, Brooklyn Public Library, ICA London, e-flux, SARA’S, PIN-UP, Greene Naftali, Rond-Point Projects, Special Special, Burlington City Arts, Museo de Arte Carillo Gil, Fall River MoCA, Cleopatra’s, Spencer Brownstone, and Knockdown Center. Simonds was awarded a NYSCA Artist Grant in 2024. He received an MA in Performance Studies from Brown University.