ROCK HILL, SC, October 05, 2026 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Seymour Simmons has been recognized for achievement in the fields of fine arts and art education.

Dr. Simmons' career in visual art and art education spans several decades, marked by his commitment to teaching drawing across disciplines and his arguments for drawing's role in holistic human development across the lifespan. In 2017, he retired as professor emeritus from the Department of Fine Arts at Winthrop University, a South Carolina public university known for its strong visual and performing arts programs. Like most children, Dr. Simmons' passion for drawing began in his early years. But, unlike many children, he never stopped. This was largely thanks to an inspiring middle-school art teacher, Edward Marecak, who, in one year, led his adolescent students from drawing like children to drawing like "grown-ups, with challenging assignments like drawing a Colorado ghost town in one-point perspective with details like woodgrain, tumble weeds, and sand in the streets, all expressively rendered in pen and ink. But, after that experience, Dr. Simmons found very few art teachers who taught such skills, which were largely considered outmoded in light of artistic trends in the 20th century.

Eventually, however, he found more traditional drawing classes in and around Boston, MA, where he worked as an illustrator and exhibiting artist while teaching drawing at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and working with "gifted and talented" middle-school students. In 1977, Dr. Simmons and co-author Marc S.A. Winer documented their teaching methods in "Drawing: The Creative Process," published by Simon and Schuster. Dr. Simmons' interest in education then led him to graduate studies at Harvard where he initially wanted to investigate the research behind Dr. Betty Edwards' popular book, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain." However, he soon became convinced, as one professor put it, that a skill as complex as drawing could never be limited to just one side of the brain or another!

With this idea in mind, Dr. Simmons studied philosophy of education with Dr. Israel Scheffler, and his dissertation traced past methods of teaching drawing as grounded in the philosophies of the time: Neo-Platonic Rationalism in the Renaissance, Empiricism in the 19th Century, Existentialism and Semiotics in the 2Oth, Century. At the same time, he developed his drawing skills in William Reimann's courses at the Carpenter Center for Visual and Environmental Studies, based on methods handed down from Reimann's teacher at Yale, Josef Albers, who in turn built upon methods he learned at the Bauhaus.

Likewise, Dr. Simmons was influenced by Howard Gardner's theory of "Multiple Intelligences," in which intelligence is measured, not by a score on a standardized IQ test but by "the ability to solve problems or make products of value to a particular culture." However, where Gardner identified drawing primarily with spatial intelligence, Dr. Simmons argues that drawing can solve problems and make products within each of Gardner's 8 1/2 intelligences: Linguistic, Logical-Mathematical, Visual-Spatial, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, Naturalist, and Existential. This theory also justifies promoting "graphicacy" as an equal complement to literacy and numeracy across the curriculum. Inspired by such ideas, Dr. Simmons did research at Harvard Project Zero (PZ), where Dr. Gardner was co-director, on cross-disciplinary projects including one which involved using early Macintosh computers to teach art, music, and social studies, while another project, Arts PROPEL, integrated production, perception, reflection, and learning in art, music, dance, and creative writing.

Based on his experience at Project Zero, Dr. Simmons received a grant to develop a "Teacher Education Program Consortium," to bring together diverse programs concerned with experiential, student-centered pedagogy, and authentic "real-world" assessment. Concurrently, Dr. Simmons instructed courses in drawing and presentation graphics for the Radcliffe Seminars Landscape Design Program while, in the summers from 1983 to 2019, his teaching extended internationally with Painting in France workshops.

From 1988 to 1993, Dr. Simmons was an assistant professor in the Department of Art Education at Massachusetts College of Art and Design where he also taught drawing in the Foundation (1st year) program, while advising and coordinating the Master of Science in Art Education program between 1990 and 1993. "Mass Art," as it is called, is the only public art school in the US, and was established to train public school teachers to teach drawing, considered an essential skill during the Industrial Revolution. Winthrop, like Mass Art, is a public university with a state-wide commitment to the arts, housing the "Arts in Basic Curriculum Institute, based on a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support classroom teachers to work with arts specialists to integrate the visual and performing arts across the subject areas. At both Mass Art and Winthrop, Dr. Simmons' position regularly combined teaching drawing and teaching art education. At Winthrop, he was instrumental in shaping both undergraduate and graduate level course curricula while serving as coordinator for the undergraduate art education program from 2001 to 2014 and for the Master of Arts in Art Education program between 2001 and 2009.

While at Winthrop, Dr. Simmons' research was supported by two sabbaticals. In 2004-2005, he visited drawing programs in Paris, France to determine the impact of digital media as well as looking at diverse methods for teaching drawing using more traditional media. In 2011, Dr. Simmons was invited as a visiting professor to Teachers College, Columbia University where he participated in the first of an ongoing series of symposia on "Thinking Through Drawing," bringing together an international network of artists, designers, psychologists, and educators. For the second semester, he returned to Project Zero where he documented a range of drawing initiatives at PZ and across the campus, including South African artist William Kentridge's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, entitled "Six Drawing Lessons."

The following year, Dr. Simmons co-edited with Laurel Campbell an anthology published by the National Art Education Association, "The Heart of Art Education: Holistic Approaches to Creativity, Integration, and Transformation." Then, in 2021, Dr. Simmons brought together his dissertation with contemporary concerns in "The Value of Drawing Instruction in the Visual Arts and Across Curricula: Philosophical and Historical Arguments for Drawing in the Digital Age," published by Routledge.

Since retiring in 2017, Dr. Simmons continues his research on drawing and his own drawing practice. In terms of research, he recently participated in a grant from the "Imagination Institute," at the University of Pennsylvania on drawing in the development and assessment of imaginative thinking in collaboration with psychologists Jennifer Drake and Ellen Winner, along with Winthrop art faculty member, Seth Rouser. He then co-edited an edition of the journal, "Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice," on his argument that the digital revolution does not spell the "death of drawing" was some have predicted but instead will demand a generation of visual thinkers in an age dominated by visual media. With such concerns in view, Dr. Simmons launched a blog, "Why Draw?" with "Psychology Today," to share recent research about various aspects of drawing He also continues to publish articles and present at conferences dealing with diverse dimensions of drawing, including as a keynote speaker at a UNESCO conference on drawing and identity. In terms of practice, Dr. Simmons keeps up his own drawing identity with landscape studies in France and sketches of friends and family, especially his wife Martine, daughter Arielle, son Jonah, and grand-daughter, Talia. At the same time, he never stops learning how to draw, most recently, by taking a course in classic "academic" drawing methods at the North Carolina Academy of Art.

Dr. Simmons' mentors began with his maternal grandfather, Morris H. Block, who first encouraged his drawing, followed by the educators mentioned above. At Winthrop, his mentors included Alf Ward, Chair of the Department of Art and Design, and G. David Brown, head of the Illustration program, each of whom exemplifies drawing across the disciplines in their own ways: Ward in his involvement with the Design and Technology curriculum in the UK and Brown in his experience as a medical illustrator. Dr. Simmons is also continually inspired by former students who sustain their drawing practice and apply it, whether as exhibiting artists, as children's book illustrators, or as teachers with students at all levels.

Along with drawing, Dr. Simmons' other interests include tai-chi and learning, late in life, to play the piano. The causes he supports include social and environmental justice as well as the arts and education.

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