For Gary Simmons, who observed the vast disconnect between the political nature of hip hop and the contemporary, predominantly abstract, art of the 1980s, the union of these two modalities engendered an artistic language that could speak simultaneously to multiple publics. Neither didactic nor illustrative, but rather legible and generative, Simmons’s work prompts viewers through subtly affective clues to examine their relationship to those symbols from popular culture that he re-forges into biting social commentary.