Ginny Sims (b.1977, Little Rock, Arkansas) is a Minneapolis-based painter and ceramics sculptor.
While she has a strong traditional crafts background, her work often deviates from those strict norms and expectations, pushing the medium into places where function and expression are combined.
Sims apprenticed with potter Mike Dodd in Somerset, England and has participated in residencies and internships at Red Star Studios in Kansas City, MO; Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, CO; and at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY. Ginny has worked at potteries in Centola, Italy, and Isle of Iona, Scotland.
Sims has exhibited at numerous galleries in the US and Europe, including solo shows at Carbondale Clay Center, CO; 0fr in Paris, France; and White Page in Minneapolis, MN. Her work has been shown in The Shop Floor Project in Cumbria, England through Tiwa Select based in NYC; HAIR+NAILS, Minneapolis; and in a three-person show with Dana Schutz and Ryan Johnson at Nemeth Art Center, MN in 2022. Sims has been featured in The Financial Times, The World of Interiors, and Architectural Digest Italia.
Ginny Sims has been the recipient of numerous grants including Jerome Foundation Study and Travel Grant (2016), Jerome Ceramic Artists Project Grant (2013, 2019) and a McKnight Fellowship for Ceramic Artists (2022).
Ginny Sims’ work often references different moments in ceramic history and incorporates the cultural information she finds there with present day social and political experiences. Her vessels and sculptures acknowledge that pottery is a reflective, invisible, critical and, for millennia, necessary material object of culture. Because the history of pottery in the west is divided between industrial capitalism and folk craft traditions, and its objects are so intimately involved with the body either in its creation or its use more than any other medium, Ginny believes it can bring into dialogue aspects of the capitalist system, the body and domesticity in a palpable, straightforward way that other mediums cannot.
Sim’s previous exhibitions with HAIR+NAILS include her 2024 solo show Maud’s Bed and in group shows RIGHT NOW (2020-21), FUTURE FUTURE (2020), COLLECTING ART (2017-18), Door County Contemporary Art Fair (Fish Creek, WI) 2025, FELIX FAIR (Los Angeles, 2024) and NADA MIAMI (Miami, 2023).
www.ginnysimsceramics.com
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