Background
Christian Simms is an African American artist, originally from New York City's lower East Side. He studied literature and fine art at Georgetown University before earning a master’s degree at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In his first few days at Georgetown he was surprised when Georgetown’s art chair, Dr. Cliff Chieffo, told him he had seen Simms’ high school portfolio and believed he might be the “next Picasso.” Rather than striving for such lofty ambitions, though, Simms chose a much more modest path. He set out to pursue a career in graphic design and creative direction. Over the next four decades, Simms built a distinguished career — heading up, or contributing to, major design programs like the branding for Citigroup, Pratt, and the Negro Leagues. He also taught at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Pratt, where he became an Associate Professor, and worked alongside his friend and partner, DK Holland, on the development of ethical standards for the design industry. In 2024, Simms returned to art with a clarity that surprised even him. Drawing on his background in graphic design, he began enlarging simple pixels into bold, graphic compositions. He now approaches his work with a quiet determination, fueled by a renewed, almost childlike enthusiasm for the creative playground he once set aside.
Human Beings, Still
In February of 2025, Christian Simms began an ambitious new art project: Human Beings, Still. This ongoing portrait series explores the lives of incarcerated Black and brown men through interviews, photography, and family archives. The project replaces mugshots and institutional imagery with bold, color-driven portraits that reveal character, vulnerability, and dignity.
Human Beings, Still is grounded in Simms’s belief that most incarcerated Black men did not begin their lives as “criminals,” but as ordinary people shaped early by violence and poverty. Many also grew up in environments where dangerous figures were among the most visible role models. Simms views the American prison system as a gravitational field that disproportionately pulls Black bodies inward, making exit difficult and return likely.
The portraits resist this flattening. They insist on the presence of the human being beneath the label.
Drawing on his experience counseling notorious New Mexico prison inmate David Cheadle, Simms extends his commitment to prison reform into a sustained visual practice. The project reframes incarceration not as a collection of crimes, but as a human crisis, seeking to restore dignity to lives too often reduced to accusation.