P acking the contents of your studio into a van and crawling across New York City to a new one is no picnic—just ask the painter Carroll Dunham, who did it 11 times in 30 years. Always chasing more square footage, cheaper rent, better light, a shorter commute, a less tragic deli or maybe just a slightly longer lease, he stored his paint in plastic squeeze bottles and hoarded nothing. “I enjoyed setting up studios and felt that my work would happen wherever I was,” Dunham says. For his wife, the photographer and filmmaker Laurie Simmons, whose practice often involves camera rigs, elaborate sets, props and costumes, moving was to be avoided at all costs.
In 2007, the couple bought a house in Cornwall, a town in the green northwest corner of Connecticut. They hadn’t lived and worked in the same place since sharing two floors of a forlorn SoHo loft building in the ’80s, and it suddenly seemed like a good idea. “I wanted to stop running,” Dunham says, recalling the pressures he was feeling at the time. He remembers telling himself, “We’re going to spend less money. We’re going to travel more. It’s going to be great.”
Over the past 18 years, they’ve settled into rural life with obvious pleasure, but they haven’t stopped moving. The Cornwall house, which the artists, both 75, occasionally share with their children Lena, 39, and Cyrus, 33, is a comfortable home and an extravagant warren of studio spaces, a variable landscape that flourishes on their commitment to making and living with art.
On a Friday afternoon, Simmons and Dunham are unwrapping sandwiches from the local deli at a long table in their kitchen. Like the rest of the Georgian-style house, it’s generously proportioned, with high ceilings, intricate moldings and a fireplace. A supersized central island with a milk-glass top reflects a row of candy-colored Murano glass lights, supplying a little ice cream parlor giddiness.
The week before, a joint exhibition of the artists’ work finished a six-month run at the Consortium Museum in Dijon, France. It was a first for them, and it broke a privately held taboo.
“Years ago it would’ve been an automatic no,” Simmons says of the invitation to show side by side. “We had a kind of unspoken rule about things like that.” But they liked the museum’s curator, Éric Troncy, and decided they might learn something from lying back and letting things happen. Troncy shaped the list of works without their input, and when the couple arrived in Dijon, posters featuring Simmons’ portrait of their collie, Penny, hung all over town.
The show was “nothing but delightful,” she says. “Everything informed everything else in a new way, and—I don’t want to speak for Carroll—but it made me look at things I’d done in the context of his work, which was really interesting.” The installation was playful and associative, a sign of how times have changed for a pair of provocateurs whose work has often been seen as mutually allergic.
Roberta Smith, the former co-chief art critic of The New York Times, met Simmons and Dunham in 1979, two years after they met one another. She told me that despite differences in media and technique, both artists carefully construct their images and “let you see the seams.” For most of Simmons’ career, Smith says, “Laurie has arranged sets, dolls, images and props into barely put-together scenes. Even now she disrupts her relatively slick AI-generated images by adding things like fabric and jewelry to the surfaces. Carroll has an evolving repertoire of parts—figures, trees, wood-grain cabins or interiors, a dog or a horse, color and line, sculptures—that he builds and re-builds into different scenes with a different sense of dramatic tension.” Stylistically, she suggests, “both of them are closet formalists, despite their clear involvement with subject matter, narrative and politics.”
At the sunlit dining table, memories of their early typecasting still manage to tick them off. “We were operating in the same world, and sometimes even in the same galleries, but we were perceived as being from different aisles in the grocery store,” Dunham says.
“I was embarrassed to be dating him at first because he was a painter,” Simmons admits. “I mean, painting was dead. And I was like, I’m going out with one.”
“She liked me more than she liked my work,” he jokes.
“That’s not true,” she says.
“It is true.”
“You always say that. I don’t.”
“I liked your work more than I liked you,” Dunham jabs playfully. “But honestly, I think we were fortunate. We could take what the other was doing seriously, but we didn’t get in each other’s way.”
O n buying the Cornwall property, Dunham found himself so out of the way—out of New York, out of his element, out of touch with his wife, who’d stayed in the city until their younger child was out of high school—that he started graffitiing the walls of his studio bathroom. The three-story house, built by a local farming family in the early 19th century, had seen worse. Partly destroyed by fire in 1911, it was reconstructed a year later in brick with a fireproof lining, which Dunham discovered when he tried adding a dormer window and found himself mano a mano with a concrete wall.
In 1956, the building was acquired by a boy’s academy called Marvelwood School. When the school relocated in 1995, a developer swooped in, restored it to a private home and sold it to Simmons and Dunham, who also picked up the adjacent barn. The developer turned out to be “a real craftsman,” says New York architect David Bers, a friend of the couple who consulted on some additional work. “He actually made it smaller than it originally was—I’d say he knocked down a quarter of the house to make it reasonable for someone to think about buying.” Weirdly, he stopped short of adding a kitchen or bathrooms (there was only one). What the couple bought, Bers says, “was more like a model of a house.”
This was catnip for Simmons, whose work often uses domestic settings as raw material to break down, send up and otherwise poke at subjects like consumerism and the constructed feminine self. The house starred in her 2018 feature film “My Art,” and it regularly slides into other projects, including her influential series of “Love Doll” photographs.
“Laurie’s work is about imagining yourself in scenarios and situations,” says Bers. “She sees space as narrative.” In preparation for guests or for no reason at all, Simmons will enlist whoever is around to help her recast the dining room as a drawing room or the music room as a ballroom. Her design choices are equally ad hoc: the Farrow & Ball wallpaper in the living room, with its vermicelli squiggles, was chosen because it reminded her of Dunham’s loop-the-loop pencil drawings, and the persimmon-colored Togo sofas and chairs in the TV room were traded for art with a friend who was redecorating. (“I love orange,” Simmons explains.) Mid-century lamps with bombshell curves and kooky shades are Dunham’s contribution. And where the walls are densely hung with art—by friends, family and artists the couple admires—he has had a free hand. “He over hangs,” Simmons says with exasperation. “Honestly.”
By midafternoon, one end of the milk glass counter has disappeared beneath Dunham’s carton of black cherry seltzer, Simmons’ mug of Earl Grey tea and stacks of candy boxes belonging to Lena, who just celebrated a birthday. Now married and based in London, she’s back home in Cornwall for a few months to work on film projects for Netflix and Apple/A24, and living in a snug house she built with Bers at the rear of the property. For company she’s adopted a pair of 12-week-old piglets, which may or may not be appearing onscreen soon.
Simmons is taking it all in stride. “My daughter will have overflow guests and ask, ‘Can’t they just stay with you?’ And we’ll say, ‘We have no room.’” She pauses to open a box of chocolates. “Carroll and I have what a lot of artists have—we have space dysmorphia. It’s just never enough space. I mean, there are reasons Picasso filled up houses and shut the door and then got other houses. That would be a total fantasy.”
The couple’s spatial preoccupations have clearly been contagious. Cyrus, a writer and activist living between New York and L.A., remembers the repeated scenario of coming home from school to a new living room: “Sometimes it bothered me, but I definitely caught the bug. Whenever I’m in a low mood or need some inspiration, I do the same thing.”
Lena sees the behavior less like an illness and more like a cure. “I have come to believe it’s part of what keeps my parents together, this constant shifting vision of what an ideal space is and how to use it,” she says. “My friends often comment on how youthful they seem and how vital they are, and I think this sustained interest in the world—nothing is fixed—is a big part of that. They both came from homes that were a bit stuck in time: the couch went someplace and it stayed there, and that was a stand-in for rigid thinking. In a way, I’m at home on a film set because my life has been a film set.”
Simmons suggests a walk, and we head out past a vegetable garden and over to the barn with Penny in tow. We pass a handful of Dunham’s sheet-metal sculptures in the tall grass.
“This was Carroll’s studio, but he gave me a little chunk as a present,” she says as we enter the barn, which once held school classrooms and several faculty apartments. “I needed another viewing area.” Hanging on the white walls of her not-so-small space are four unfinished works from a new series of photographs generated from text-to-image AI programs, their surfaces clotted with hand-stitched embroidery. Down a hallway, a cedar- paneled, color-coordinated apartment Simmons uses as a set displays the body-paint portraits she first exhibited in 2018. Dunham’s unfolding series of rooms is on the other side of the wall.
“I’ve never seen anyone feather their physical nest to make art quite like Carroll Dunham,” says Bers. “Before he does a painting, he’ll lay clean canvas across the floor. He’ll put a beautiful pine ledge on the wall. He stages environments to make the paintings. And it’s always in flux.”
Back in the main house, Dunham’s former workspace has been replaced by a tidy gym and a guestroom painted a refulgent lilac. Next door, an assistant is assembling a photo archive of Dunham’s works on paper; his first drawing retrospective will open in January at the Art Institute of Chicago, “mostly curated from my flat files,” the artist says.
Though he rarely exhibits them, drawings have played a critical role in his practice for decades. “There are always people who understand how interesting and beautiful and important drawing is,” he says. “Although I feel like that’s not top of mind now, with how much people are focused on spectacle and on market results and stuff like that. Drawing doesn’t give you the kind of wow that hundred-million-dollar paintings do.”
T
he night before, one of Dunham’s paintings had set a new auction record for his work in a Sotheby’s New York sale from the collection of Barbara Gladstone, his longtime dealer. His market has shown a steady, career-long rise, especially when compared with the highs and lows of some of his peers. After leaving Gladstone last winter, he joined Matthew Brown Gallery in New York and continues to exhibit with a handful of other dealers in London and Europe. Simmons has a solo show up at Almine Rech’s gallery in Paris through December 20, and her recent AI series is currently on view at Miami’s Andrew Reed Gallery.
Fiercely independent as artists, they have always been united as a couple. “Carroll and Laurie have forged an amazing partnership that has sustained them through thick and thin, two kids and numerous changes of address,” Roberta Smith says. “Jerry and I haven’t faced some of the pressures they have”—Jerry Saltz, Smith’s husband, is the art critic of New York Magazine—“but it’s clear to each of us that we all do work that can be very isolating and that it is amazing to share it with a partner who understands exactly what you’re going through.”
Up in Cornwall, work gets done, and the scene keeps shifting. A few years ago, Dunham cut a hole in the barn’s second-floor ceiling to access the attic and discovered a two-bedroom apartment, complete with a child’s wallpapered bedroom. “It was so freaky!” Simmons says. “It looked like a set from one of my photographs.” They decided to gut the attic space and build “the New York loft we could never afford,” she jokes, ever the disaffected New Yorker. The result, as conceived by Dunham, is a loft in the empyrean sense—more CGI than IRL, with a pair of Danish black leather sofas and a cast iron soaking tub among a handful of furnishings allowed on the satin-finished oak floors.
“We’ve had so many lofts and lived in so many places, but this one is pristine,” Simmons says dreamily. “Because no one lives in it. If the kids ever take over the house, we would live here. And just go downstairs to work.”
