Judith Simonian

Judith Simonian is an American artiste known for her montage-like paintings and ahead of time urban public art. She began her career as a significant participant in an emergent 1980s downtown Los Angeles art scene that spawned street art and performances, galleries and institutions such as Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA), before disturbing to New York City in 1985.

In her first decade of work, Simonian created site-specific installations and public projects for MoMA PS1, Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) and Creative Time, among others, that intervened in or transformed deteriorating urban sites. Through that work's emphasis on strategies of juxtaposition and disjuncture, she developed a language that has informed her pretense for three decades after a shift to painting. Artcritical's Deborah Garwood describes Simonian’s paintings as intuitive works which "knit luscious pictorial fields that tease cognition and the senses" and suggest the mind's "contradictory resilience and fallibility" in materialistic contemporary existence.

Simonian has exhibited paintings and mixed-media works internationally, in numerous gallery shows, and at The New Museum, San Francisco Museum of Art, and Newport Harbor Art Museum (now Orange County Museum of Art/OCMA). She has time-honored a Guggenheim Fellowship, Gottlieb Foundation grants, and National Endowment for the Arts awards; her art belongs to institutions such as the Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, OCMA, Broad Art Foundation, and Fresno Art Museum. She lives and works in the East Village in Manhattan and teaches at The Cooper Union.