Artist, activist, philanthropist and community leader Daniel “Danny” Simmons has died at 72. His family recently announced his death but did not indicate a location, date or cause, reports the New York Times.
Born in Hollis, Queens in 1953, Simmons was older brother to hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons and rapper Joseph Simmons, known as Rev. Run in the rap trio Run DMC. In 1995, the three brothers co-founded the New York gallery Rush Arts (named for Russell’s nickname) and Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, whose mission was to provide exhibitions, events, art education, scholarships, and grants for disadvantaged artists of color. Simmons also founded Corridor Gallery in his Brooklyn loft apartment. He moved to Philadelphia in 2015, where he founded another Rush Arts. With Russell, he established the HBO show Def Poetry Jam, which ran from 2002 to 2007. A Broadway production of the show won a Tony Award for best special theatrical event in 2003. Simmons also collected African art and comic books.
Simmons described his artistic style as Neo-African Abstract Expressionism. His work is in the collections of actor Will Smith and music industry executive and producer Lyor Cohen as well as organizations and institutions including Chase Manhattan Bank; the United Nations; New York’s Schomburg Center for Black Culture; and the Smithsonian Institution’s African American Museum and Anacostia Community Museum.
The exhibition “Danny Simmons: The Journey to Everything” appeared at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore in 2024 and the Houston Museum of African American Culture in 2025. In BMoreArt, Dora Marke wrote that Simmons “delivers a beautifully executed panegyric to the ancestors who we may not see but who take on materiality in and through us.” In 2009, Spanierman Gallery mounted a 15-year survey of his work; in the New York Times, Benjamin Genoccio wrote that the works “shape things up,” adding, “Totemic, mythic imagery abounds, giving the best of the paintings visual force and a disquieting strangeness. Whimsy is also prevalent, be it in the artist’s twisted looping lines or amped-up color schemes.”
Simmons also published several books of prose, fiction, and poetry. In 2004, he published the novel Three Days As The Crow Flies, about the 1980s New York art scene, with Atria Books. The New York Times dubbed it “a fond tribute to the naughty fun of the good old days.” In 2007 he published I Dreamed My People Were Calling But I Couldn’t Find My Way Home with Moore Black Press, which was illustrated with his own work. Artist Renee Cox praised it, saying, “The paintings are dazzling, wonderfully inventive, and are juxtaposed to street vernacular poetry that is so lyrical I felt like dancing in the paintings.”
In a 2017 interview with Griot, Simmons expressed his deep faith in art, saying, “Art saves lives. It’s that simple.”
