Danny Simmons, an artist, poet, gallerist and energetic cultural organizer who did much to promote the work of emerging Black artists alongside his younger brothers, the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and the rapper Joseph Simmons, better known as Rev Run of the group Run-DMC, has died. He was 72.
His family announced the death in a statement on Monday, but did not specify a location, date or cause.
Mr. Simmons emerged as a force in the Brooklyn art world in the 1990s, as an artist, organizer and mentor.
Having left a comfortable job with the New York City government, he began to paint abstract expressionist works that drew on African motifs and the influence of European and Latin American Surrealists. His first solo show was in New Haven, Conn., in 1993; soon he was appearing in group and solo shows in galleries around New York.
But his influence on the city’s creative world went far beyond his canvases.
Recognizing how difficult it was for emerging Black artists to get attention, he and his brother Russell started a gallery in Manhattan in 1995. They called it Rush Arts, a reference to Russell’s nickname, Rush.
Around the same time, Mr. Simmons created the Corridor Gallery in the front hall — hence the name — of his expansive home in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Also in 1995, the three Simmons brothers founded the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation; it became the source of a variety of initiatives, including scholarships and grants for emerging artists.
For years, Mr. Simmons held poetry readings at his galleries and others. In 2001, he persuaded Russell to create a poetry-focused version of “Def Comedy Jam,” the highly successful comedy show on HBO that Russell had helped create and produce; the result, “Def Poetry Jam,” appeared on HBO starting in 2002. A stage version opened on Broadway the same year and won a Tony Award.
“Danny’s the fine artist, the real thing, a cultural hero,” Russell Simmons told The New York Times in 2004, adding, jokingly: “Joey’s the commercial artist, and I’m just an exploiter, the greedy one.”
Daniel Simmons Jr. was born on Aug. 17, 1953, in Hollis, a neighborhood in eastern Queens that has produced a long list of hip-hop royalty, including the rappers LL Cool J, Ja Rule and Young MC.
His parents were middle-class professionals with a strong intellectual streak: His father, Daniel Simmons Sr., was a truant officer who taught Black history at local colleges, and his mother, Evelyn, was a teacher who painted in her free time.
They encouraged their children to pursue their passions, though doing so took Danny longer than his brothers, who both emerged as major figures in the hip-hop scene of the early 1980s.
Mr. Simmons received a bachelor’s degree in social work from New York University and a master’s degree in public finance from Long Island University.
His undergraduate career was interrupted by his arrest, in 1973, in conjunction with a campus drug raid. As part of his student job at the entrance to a dorm, he signed in two F.B.I. agents who were there to buy drugs from a dealer in the building. The agents accused him of being an accomplice.
Under the draconian Rockefeller drug laws of the time, Mr. Simmons faced a mandatory sentence of 15 years, although prosecutors told him that they wanted to drop the charges. He pleaded guilty, served about two years and then returned to finish his studies.
The experience later led him to create a full college scholarship for formerly incarcerated artists who wanted to complete their degrees.
Mr. Simmons spoke openly about his struggles with drug addiction. He finally went to a rehabilitation facility in the early 1990s, and became sober not long before starting his art career.
For over a decade, he worked for the city’s Bureau of Child Support (now the Office of Child Support Services). In the evening and on weekends, he began painting and organizing events for artists. But he yearned to do more.
In the early 1990s, he went to his mother for advice.
“Go ahead and be an artist,” he recalled her saying. “Nobody’s going to let you starve.”
He quit his job in 1992 to pursue art full time. He also wrote several books, including a novel, “Three Days as the Crow Flies” (2003), about the 1980s New York art scene, and a mixture of storytelling and art, “The Return of Two Dick Willie” (2018).
He is survived by his wife, Keia; a son, Jamel; a grandson; and his brothers.
Mr. Simmons moved to Philadelphia in 2015, in part because he wanted to recapture the communal artistic energy that he remembered from pre-gentrified Brooklyn.
The next year, he opened a new gallery, Rush Arts Philadelphia, and joined a program dedicated to painting large-scale murals around the city. He curated exhibits at his gallery and at local museums, and once again became a grass-roots force in the arts, building a vibrant creative world from the ground up.
“We just need other artists who want to see us grow, artists who wanna show,” he told The Idle Class magazine in 2022. “And we need people who are willing to put in the work because of the culture, because it needs to be done.”
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