Daniel “Danny” Simmons, a force in New York’s Black arts community, dies at 72
Daniel “Danny” Simmons, the artist, activist, philanthropist, and community leader who helped build institutions for artists of color in New York, has died at 72. His death marks the loss of a figure whose work moved fluidly between painting, cultural organizing, and philanthropy, with an influence that extended well beyond the studio.
Simmons was the older brother of music figures Russel Simmons and Joseph Simmons, known as Rev Run, and the three brothers co-founded Rush Arts and the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation. The foundation supported disadvantaged artists of color, while Rush Arts became a key platform for exhibition and community-building. Simmons also founded Corridor Gallery in his Brooklyn loft apartment, turning a domestic space into a site for artistic exchange.
His own practice, which he described as Neo-African Abstract Expressionism, was recently featured in the traveling exhibition “Danny Simmons: The Journey to Everything.” The show appeared at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore in 2024 and the Houston Museum of African American Culture in 2025, underscoring the continued reach of his work and the institutions that have championed it.
In a 2017 interview, Simmons put his philosophy in plain terms: “Art saves lives. It’s that simple.” For many artists and organizers who worked alongside him, that conviction was not rhetoric but a blueprint. His death leaves behind a network of galleries, foundations, and exhibitions that reflect a career shaped as much by service as by making art.
The roundup also noted that David Hockney asked for only two people at his funeral — his partner, Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima, and his great-nephew, Richard Hockney — while memorial services are planned in London, Yorkshire, Paris, and Los Angeles. Next year, Tate Britain and the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern will host Hockney exhibitions.
Elsewhere in the art world, German art historian Wulf Herzogenrath died in Berlin at 82, Israeli kinetic sculptor Yaacov Agam died at 98, and a hacker accessed about 7,200 unsold NFTs of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” at Vienna’s Belvedere Museum. Marc Spiegler also argued that galleries are under strain as the art world has expanded faster than sales.
Taken together, the day’s headlines point to a field in motion: mourning its losses, revisiting its legacies, and confronting the pressures of scale, technology, and institutional change.
