The passing of Peter Simensky, artist and chair of the Graduate Fine Arts MFA program at California College of the Arts, rocked his communities in the Bay Area, New York, Portland, Mexico, and Los Angeles. Simensky was the rare artist-teacher who took a stance, who didn’t shy away from hard conversations, and was also endlessly kind, advocating for his students at every turn.
Simensky deeply investigated systems of value, in his teaching and in his art. He made work using materials like pyrite (fool’s gold) that, by virtue of being underestimated, lay powerful claim to our collective imagination. Jeanne Gerrity, interim director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, wrote to me in an email, “Peter cleverly exposed the fascinating yet often sinister relationship between contemporary art and financial capital, offering genuine connection and community as antidotes.” Over time, he started using pyrite as a conduit in radio sculptures, live audio sets, performances, and workshops that, per Gerrity, “engaged a range of topics from regional issues to global politics,” whether the history of mining in the Bay Area and in Portland, or international currency exchange.
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His 2021 project, Pyrite Radio,used fool’s gold to pick up pirate radio stations on the AM frequency, the pyrite itself hidden inside sculptural contraptions that resembled wind chimes, plastic beaded jewelry, and umbrellas for kids shaped like frogs. His friend, artist Cara Levine, emailed that Simensky came to the Pyrite Radio works “after a decades-long obsession with currency—its physicality, (connection to materiality/earth) and ethereality (connection to time and society/air).” He gathered us around these rickety contraptions with their jury-rigged wiring to listen to static fuzz as the pirate stations came in and out of audibility. People were alternately repelled by the noise or magnetized by it: the distortion lent the flimsy objects powerful agency.
In 2019, Simensky told me a story of coming across a group of workers on a break, squatting on plastic stools around a tiny transistor radio as they tried to tune in to an international soccer game. To him, this scene illustrated the ways we actually discover value—by testing signals, using trial and error to learn, and finding attunement around a common frequency.
Outside the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco in 2021, Simensky bounced a found AM signal of Mexican ranchera music off the bronze body of Rodin’s Thinker. For the final Pyrite Radio video piece, he edited that audio together with video footage that he shot while participating in Black Lives Matter protests, tearing down monuments of slaveholders and colonialists in Golden Gate Park. Simensky speaks about The Thinker’s “silent scream” in his 2021 conversation with curator Claudia Schmuckli. He also explained how his pyrite/pirate radio might transform settler colonial extractivism (gold mining, data mining) into an activist swarm of bodies coming together to renew their own inherent sense of value. The artist and curator Aki Onda, who visited with Simensky while he was working on that project, emailed me that he “found [Simensky’s] approach to radio unique and inspiring as he found its essence as a primitive transmission medium, whereas almost all artists and composers deal with its technological and aural contexts.”
In 2015, Simensky was interviewed by Kristan Kennedy, curator at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), about his 2015 work Surface Contents 1 & 2. That piece—a series of actions, architectural interventions, and a site-specific video—captures the specter of gold dust animating shafts of light in PICA’s warehouse space: “A speck of gold is nothing… but once cast off as a sea of particles moving in the air, it opens up, becomes a mass, a sculptural form, a column of light, a dancing vibrating hive—simply to go away again. The drama is in those moments of coming together, but ultimately, the work resides as well in the falling away, residue, absence, or memory,” he told her, adding that he was “equally interested in the remains of the event itself—as a footprint or a sparkling gold particle trapped in the crease of someone’s skin.” As with Pyrite Radio, the value is transferred away from the precious metal itself and toward its powers of transmission and entanglement.
As so many in the art world can attest, bureaucracies are rapidly finding ways to foreclose on our last remaining creative spaces. As friends, Simensky and I often discussed ways to liberate the imagination from the suffocating enclosure of capitalism, and tried to carve out time for spaces of meaning. In Peter’s case, this often meant mediating with the churning surf; conviviality with friends, children, and elders; learning through play; unlearning through art; and deep, deep listening.
So, what does our practice of mourning look like right now? Simensky was a Jewish American deeply empathetic to the suffering of Palestinians, and it is impossible not to acknowledge that to be Jewish right now is to have your very identity mined for the most horrible and murderous purpose. Had we held him tenderly enough? Inspired by his work, I find myself seeking signals in the life that remains. If we reimagine our pedagogy and practice in Simensky’s wake we might consider how we insist on the values that he held dear—the preciousness of all life, the value of creative spaces, leisure time, as well as coming together so that we don’t fall apart.