I first became aware of Simone Gad running into her at art openings where she was often accompanied by Sheree Rose. I heard that Simone was a former child actor and outsider artist, but didn’t know her all that well. That all changed one day when Sean Meredith suggested we partner for an exhibition at Track 16.
I saw pages of her journals in which she painted animal portraits on top of vintage pinups. Her collages were obsessive and soulful. I was immediately hooked. But we needed a third artist.
I suggested Debra Broz who was working on mutant ceramic bunnies. The exhibition was called Stuck Together. It wasn’t so much that we were stuck with each other… rather Simone, Debra, and I bonded over time. We shared playful handcrafted responses to mass-produced objects and images charged with autobiographical fragments. Every piece had a story. When I asked Simone about one of her paintings, she told me about eating dim sum after a break up in the 70’s.
I admired her way of taking life’s rough moments and making beauty out of them. And she never stopped producing work, even when she was in and out of the hospital. In one of her last pieces, she combined photos from her colonoscopies with her pin ups. I could go on and on about Simone, but I’d rather you hear about her in her own words…
Early Life + Career
My family and I came from Belgium in 1951. They were Hollocaust survivors. My whole family were in the concentration camps and forced labor and in the ghettos and we settled in Boyle Heights and my mother got me into showbiz instantly when I was four years old.
So I became a Meglin Kiddie and grew up in Hollywood. Meglin Kiddie was a studio where Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney went to study acting, singing, piano, dance where I went, but I sucked at acrobatics and everything except for tap dancing and I loved acting and I was a so-so singer.
I’m starting off with this because I grew up in Hollywood and I quit acting many times, because I had a lot of difficulty as an ingenue and childhood teenage actress in that there was – there were molestations and really dark pedophilia stuff that I had to fight then.
I got involved in the art world as a young adult. I couldn’t afford to go to art school, but Wallace Berman and Al Hansen were my first mentors and and Al Hansen got me involved in the Fluxus movement in 1972 So.. I’ve been a fiber artist, a fabric artist and my father was a custom European tailor. The whole family were tailors and he was the first person who taught me how to draw. I learned how to draw a camel and a house when I was a little girl.
Video: Cesar Delgadillo, Photos: Simone Gad, Track 16, Sean Meredith, Marsian De Lellis, Debra Broz, Alex Griffin
Pin ups
So art stuck with me and I decided very early on that I wanted to have an art and acting career which was very taboo, because you were only allowed to have one career or you were considered a dilettante so I was fighting that, but I knew inherently that I had to do both that my art would save me with the acting when things were difficult and then back and forth.
And I would go to Fredericks of Hollywood and I fell in love with the catalogues of the sexy girls that wore negligees and they were nude underneath and also sexy corsets and bras so that stuck with me. And then years later. I found myself – many years later starting to make the pinups with animal rescue drawings cause I’ve always loved animals of all kinds but I wasn’t allowed to have a pet at home. Neither was my brother and I had a deep deep love for animals, which I carry to this day and I feel that they’re the best part of us.
I pair the pinups with the animals and they protect each other and the pin ups like they start off from circa 1850’s to 1970’s, which includes some of my self portraits with the polaroids – some of which are over here. That’s one of them with the red parrot and then there’s a couple of others there’s an “Airways” with a black bunny
[…] I love bunnies too and I hate that they’re being experimented on with these farming cages, it’s really nightmarish, so I’ve been making more bunny drawings too to go with the pinups […]
I did a collaboration with the late John Schroeder in the 70’s and Joe and Rick Potts at Otis. I was modeling at that time and showing my work I was starting to show my work at museums and galleries cause I had to make a living and I hadn’t decided to go back to acting until later in life in my forties and then when I got back into acting, I decided to stick with it and do both careers for the rest of my life.
Track 16
So I met Laurie [Steelink] in 2010. Actually, I met her way early a lot in years before that. I always loved Track 16 and I had a feeling – a strong feeling that I could connect with this venue and then I was in touch with Laurie for a long time. Then she invited me to lunch in Chinatown and she asked me to bring this new series of pinups with animals and I was working with Sharpies at that time.
So then Laurie told me that she wanted to include me in Track 16 for the punk show and she gave me a beautiful installation and they’re here, some of them The gallery kept the early ones, which are at the bottom […] which is really great. And then Sean [Meredith] invited me to do a two or three person show here so – which was really thrilling for me and then I worked on the rest of the series.
It’s a combination of French lesbian pinups from the 40’s and 50’s that Pierre Picot sent me from Paris in a magazine, so I cut up the whole magazine to make that series there, I including all of them here and then Elmer Batters who was a sailor in the 40’s during World War II. Then he formed a club, a photography club of amateur photographers and started taking photographs of models from the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s and he had a big foot fetish so I included.. they’re included here too. He loved feet and shoes and stockings so and then he’d work up higher and higher to the rest of the body.
Video: Cesar Delgadillo, Photos: Track 16, Sean Meredith
Architecture + Kitsch
Then the paintings in the early 1990’s… cause I’ve been doing this career for 56 years… and I showed in New York with Monique Knowlton when I was doing my assemblage Hollywood pieces and my work is archived in MOMA PS1 from 1980 forward and also at the ONE library at USC. But at any rate I started showing with a gallery on Santa Monica Boulevard and I had made a series of pinups with little bits of facades of buildings vintage buildings from the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, so I loved architecture and she suggested that I start painting buildings without collage too as a separate series, so I started making small ones and then they got bigger and bigger.
Then I showed – I made The Chinatown series when I was showing with a gallery, L2Kontemporary, so I took pictures of Chinatown Plaza, the pagodas there and the fu dogs and they turned into an extensive series from that but going back a little bit to the early 70’s, I had a Chinese boyfriend that I was madly in love with who took me to dim sum every Sunday and that stayed with me and then seeing the difference between Brussels and Chinatown just inspired me so much from childhood.
And I would go to the souvenir shops and buy chachkies in the souvenir stores for my early assemblages and my mom collected all kinds of kitsch: Belgium kitsch, Polish kitsch, Japanese, English bone china, so I was surrounded by that all these years and kitsch became, you know, I sniffed it, and it fell into my body
Rescuing Architecture
Well. Chinatown to me. I hope that it stays forever, but so much of the architecture of Los Angeles has disappeared and I feel it’s part of me and my responsibility as an artist with the way I work to rescue Chinatown in my work. I also made a series of Victorian – Victorian buildings and craftsmen and then Belgium too – Belgium Art Nouveau facades cause I have a strong connection there as well throughout these years… So the more of Los Angeles that disappears, the more I’m driven to make paintings to save them in a painting, even though I can’t save them in life as much as I would like to. […] And I also make male pinups as well.
Video: Cesar Delgadillo, Photos: Track 16, Sean Meredith
Surviving
Well the collages, in a sense, even though they’re about other women who were vulnerable models and struggling to earn a living even prostituting themselves from the 1850’s, because that was the only way they could earn a living, besides maybe teaching or being a housewife, at a farm or a ranch but that was their sole sense of survival, the ones that chose that or it was or it was chosen for them, because of the abuser, probably abuse… But these are in a sense, self portraits […]
Yeah yeah – cause they transcend porn. To me they’re not pornographic, they’re erotic, certainly, but they go a lot deeper […] Well since childhood, I – I had an attraction for women, girls and boys. So that never left me, but I suppressed it a lot… and I experienced gay bashing when I was older.. and had to go into the closet and then would go in and out of the closet depending on what was happening and there was also a big taboo in the industry, where you couldn’t talk about these deep things that were happening.. And also, this was prior – way prior to the #metoo movement, the things I went through and other child actors… so – so does that explain it? because…
Acid
I’ve always had a strong connection.. like I said before with pinups and animals and I work intuitively, but I also do a lot of research and I’m very emotionally involved in the work… also with painting.. Many years ago, I took an acid trip and the buildings were melting and beautiful colors and I never forgot that. That image which stayed for so many hours and just kept going and going and going until the acid left my body.. But I never forgot it. And then when I started painting all these years later, it was like I was going through the same experience, but not on the drug of LSD. It was just in my body and coming out that way and that’s – it’s a spiritual thing, but it’s also emotional for me. Making my work is very emotional and it also helps me with auditions and my acting as well. They feed each other… Okay, so that’s my answer.
Video: Cesar Delgadillo, Photos: Track 16, Sean Meredith
Final Thoughts
Marcus Kuiland-Nazario: Anyone have one last question?
Tom Patchett: I just have one comment, Simone. I’m trying to remember the play you were in at Track 16 at Bergamot Station. It’s something about an elephant.
Simone Gad: (Gasp) Yes!
Tom Patchett: That was fabulous
Simone: Oh, Thank you
Tom: I’ll never forget the image of you with that huge background too
Marcus: Wait, didn’t you work on that Curt [Lemieux] ?
Simone: Curt was in it too. Asher directed it!
Marcus: It was Asher Hartman
Simone: Yeah! I love that play
Curt: Simone was supposed to embody the elephant
Simone: Yes, I was supposed to be the elephant
Curt: and you did a great job
Simone: Oh God, thank you
Marcus: Okay so any last words?
Marsian: I was also in an elephant play as a child. We wore paper bags and had trunks. That’s what I’d like to say. Thank you.
Marcus: Last words. Simone?
Simone: I’m just happy to be in this great show and I’m really grateful. I’m going to start crying – so
Marsian: Awwww
Debra Broz: I’m just going to agree with Simone and I want to say thank you to her and Marsian and Sean for
Marsian: and Cesar
Debra: And Cesar..
Simone: And Cesar!
Debra: …who put up all the shelves and painted the walls and
Marcus: Cesar!
Debra: And also thank you to Marcus
Simone: and Tom!
Marsian: And all of you, because it wouldn’t be anything if nobody saw it.
Simone: exactly and thank you so much for coming.. so wonderful.
Debra: I’m just glad I got to make these rabbits
Simone: I love your bunnies by the way and I love your dolls.
Marcus: And thank you Track 16, it’s an honor and privilege..
Marsian: We learned a lot about ourselves and other people
Marcus: Thank you Track 16. Thank you Simone. Thank you Marsian. Thank you Debra.
Video: Cesar Delgadillo, Photos: Asher Hartman
Saved by Simone Gad and Other Souvenirs
Simone was always acutely aware of the tenuousness, the fragility, the precarity of appearances, and certainly their physical embodiment. Without trying to attach a theoretical gloss to her life, I think she would agree that, especially in her later years, her work, whether as a fine artist or as an actor and Hollywood professional, was a constant re-assertion of her appearance, her presence in the world, her possession and hold on it. “I am here to show you something. Follow what I’m doing, see what I’ve done here. I’m saving a place for myself and it’s something to behold!” Every pigment-laden, hyper-expressive brush stroke of her paintings asserted her signature, her re-trace of a surface, a contour that recaptured a fleeting association or remembered sensation, the performance or recreation of a memory by her own hand […] (read more)
Ezrha Jean Black, Apr 29, 2021