An artist’s outfit can send any number of messages. Georgia O’Keefe in her austere blacks and whites, struck a seemingly deliberate, stark juxtaposition with the cloudy, pastel-toned washes of her southwestern paintings.
Picasso in his jaunty Breton stripe, echoed the ten homme en tricot rayé canvases he made while residing in the small French seaside town of Royan. Photographer Bill Cunningham pedaled through New York City in his French sanitation worker’s kit—a minimalist, utilitarian jacketCK that allowed him to disappear behind his camera, its own fashion statement.
If you’ve been walking the streets of Manhattan for enough years, you might have caught a glimpse of another artist in a signature ensemble. For about two decades the multidisciplinary artist Taryn Simon has been wearing a simple skirt that hits just below the knee, held up by two substantial suspenders, with a three-quarter length, slightly balloon sleeve blouse beneath.
There are adjustments—different weights and materials—as well as evolutions. A few years back, Simon, who made the first of these outfits herself but since deployed a seamstress, added aprons with a deep, wide pockets—large enough to hold a coffee thermos—and providing spare material to open a grimy door handle, a boon for germophobes, she jokes when I meet her in the studio of her friend, the photographer Thomas Dozol.
Here, dozens, maybe hundreds, of these outfits in an array of colors and tones have been removed from Simon’s bedroom closet and arrayed on racks.
Simon’s consideration, at the outset, was practical: Much of her work is photographic, and Simon needed pockets for her light meter, and also her wallet. (She used to tuck the latter into a boot: “I never wanted to carry a bag.”) But there was a deeper consideration as well, to present herself respectably, to show consideration but not excess formality.
Some of Simon’s best known work—portraits of men exonerated from crimes by DNA evidence, for instance, or photographs of Ukrainian orphans—seem to necessitate an air of composed respect. When she thinks about what has happened to these outfits, she thinks about “the world leaders they’ve stood in front of.” The writer and illustrator Juman Malouf,a friend from when Simon was an undergraduate at Brown University, tells me she had a uniform even then—“very different from the one she wears now: a pair of electric blue leather pants and a black tank top.” This one, says Malouf, “will be the outfit she wears when she is one hundred.
She will be buried in it.”
Simon was raised in New York by a mother who made almost all her clothing. At the studio, she pulls out a large tupperware stuffed with handmade children’s clothes—felted toddler tent dresses and tunics with bright red pockets and matching buttons.
They look like patterns the Swiss artist Sophie Tauber Arp might have devised if she did a collab with Marimekko—blocky, joyful designs. Simon’s grandmother was an excellent seamstress as well, able to pull off intricate smocking and lace embellishments, and her great-grandmother was an accomplished quilter.
Simon learned to sew from her mother, and growing up, the two would make regular pilgrimages to Joann Fabrics. (When the fabric chain closed its physical stores in 2025, Simon and her mother held a mourning ceremony.) Nothing was thrown away in the Simon household, and whenever a functional object could be made more beautiful—a box to hold papers, for example—it was.
“It contributed to how I see value,” Simon says. “I like to feel that I’m in something with heart in it.”
This September, Simon will take over the entire rotunda at the Guggenheim with a single project—her largest exhibition to date, about a decade in the making, and the largest debut of new work ever staged at the Guggenheim—titled Taryn Simon: Father Country, I Do Love You. “It’s the story of one man, and everything he touched,” she tells me.
That man is an unnamed federal agent whose life will be reflected in 42 individual artworks, each gesturing to the ripple-like consequences of his actions.
The exhibition, made up of text, photograph, video and sculpture is dedicated to Simon’s father, a peripatetic figure who lived all over the world, and was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease several years ago—before Simon felt she understood his full story. “The exhibition encompasses a vast range of themes and topics,” says Guggenheim curator of performance and media Nat Trotman, “but at its core it is about the way the life of one individual—which could be any of us—touches those of so many others, opening up a galaxy of stories.”
Much of Simon’s work is like this: startlingly intimate and powerfully political, figures austerely arranged against a blank wall who convey entire belief systems, historical events, or nationalistic mythmaking enterprises. In 2016, she filled the Park Avenue Armory with professional mourners, brought in from all over the world, to perform the traditions, rituals, and ceremonies associated with loss—it was a stunning installation, grief turned outward and monumental while simultaneously prompting the inward, holy reflection.
As she packs away the childhood clothes that she has carted to the studio, Simon ushers me over to look at a singular apron with a name embroidered on it. One of the mourners made it for her—a trace of her art quietly making its way into what she wears.