Laurie Simmons: Walking Objects, Legs & Shoes at Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York — Three Series, Two Never Shown Before

A miniature house strides forward on a pair of women’s legs in high heels. Nearly four decades after it was made, that image still feels like a punchline and an accusation at once. It is the cover of Laurie Simmons: Walking Objects, Legs & Shoes at Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York, on view from 12 November to 23 December 2026 on Fifth Avenue. It is Simmons’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, and it pairs one of her best-known series with two that have never been exhibited.

Who is Laurie Simmons?

Simmons is a photographer and filmmaker associated with the Pictures Generation — the loose group of artists who emerged in New York in the 1970s and turned the borrowed images of advertising, film and television into their subject. Raised on Long Island, she now lives and works between New York and Connecticut. Her early Interiors (1978), staged with dollhouse furniture and figures, set the terms for much of what followed. She received an NEA fellowship in 1984; her retrospective Big Camera/Little Camera travelled from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth to the MCA Chicago in 2018–19; and her feature film My Art premiered at Venice and Tribeca in 2017. Her work is held by the Metropolitan Museum, MoMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, LACMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Hara Museum and the Stedelijk.

Walking Objects: props with legs

The core of the exhibition is Walking Objects (1987–91). A house, a handbag, a microphone, a camera, a pocket watch and a donut are blown up into characters and set on human legs or plastic doll limbs. Works on view include Walking Purse / Another View / Leaning (1989), Walking House / Black & White / Another View (1989), Walking Microphone (with skirt), Walking Camera (little) and Walking Donut (all 1991), and the later Walking Pocket Watch (2006). The gallery also notes works made with the artist Jimmy DeSana, among them Walking Camera (Jimmy the Camera).

The humour is immediate, but the press release is clear about the stakes. Simmons herself is quoted: “Walking Objects was about the physicality of the body.” A woman literally becomes a house, a purse, a camera — the things she is expected to keep, carry or be looked at through. The series is a compact essay on how consumer culture lets people define themselves by what they own, and how women in particular are cast as objects to be displayed, used or consumed.

Two series shown for the first time

Legs & Shoes (1996)

The first revelation is Legs & Shoes, a 1996 series of glossy dye destruction prints. Doll legs stand in oversized dress shoes, Mary Janes and ballet slippers. The images play on the idiom of “growing into one’s shoes”: the toy body is dwarfed by footwear that stands for adult femininity, pointing to the physical and emotional demands placed on girls as they are trained to fill a role. Dye destruction printing, with its saturated colour and high gloss, heightens the seductive, commercial surface the pictures critique.

The Vogue Pictures (2005)

The second is The Vogue Pictures (2005) — including Vogue Bathroom, Vogue Gold Furniture and Vogue House. The magazine commissioned the series and then chose not to publish it. The gallery reads that rejection as evidence of the distance between Simmons’s vision and the conventions of fashion imagery she was questioning. Seeing these pictures now, twenty years later, is a small piece of art-historical repair.

One vocabulary across two decades

What binds the three bodies of work is a recurring set of props — doll legs, toy shoes, miniature rooms — and a method: staged sets built from domestic objects and the imagery of post-war America. Shown together, they reveal how consistently Simmons has used the miniature to examine, with considerable wit, how photographs construct ideas of femininity and the home.

Edwynn Houk and the uptown photography tradition

Edwynn Houk Gallery, on the sixth floor of 693 Fifth Avenue, is one of New York’s established specialists in photography, a context that frames Simmons as a photographer first rather than as a conceptual artist who happens to use a camera. A first solo show at a new gallery, built around previously unseen material, is also a market moment worth noting.

Why it matters for collectors and photographers

For collectors, Walking Objects is a canonical series of late-twentieth-century American photography, and the debut of Legs & Shoes and The Vogue Pictures offers rare access to fresh, historically important material by an artist already in major museum collections. For photographers, the show is a masterclass in staging: how scale, props and a single absurd substitution can make an image both funny and unsettling — and remain so for decades.

Visiting information

Edwynn Houk Gallery, 693 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10022. 12 November – 23 December 2026. Opening reception: Thursday 12 November, 6–8pm. Open Tuesday–Saturday 11:00–17:00. Tel. +1 212 750 7070, [email protected]. See the gallery’s exhibition page, our Laurie Simmons New York listing, and more openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.