Carroll Dunham: On Painting, Fatherhood, and a Life Built Slowly
This week, we're revisiting a conversation with Carroll Dunham, recorded at his home in Cornwall, Connecticut, where he lives and works alongside his wife, the artist Laurie Simmons.
Dunham has spent nearly five decades making work that resists easy categorization — thick black outlines, cartoonish nature, a deliberate collision of abstraction and figuration that has never quite settled into either. He first exhibited in New York in the 1980s, part of a generation of painters who returned to the canvas when the art world was insisting painting was finished. It wasn't, and Dunham's career since has proven why: exhibitions at the New Museum, Museum Ludwig, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, and the National Museum in Oslo, representation by galleries including Galerie Max Hetzler and Skarstedt, and, earlier this year, a five-decade retrospective — Carroll Dunham: Drawings, 1974–2024 — at the Art Institute of Chicago, on view January through June 2026 and the first museum survey focused exclusively on his drawings.
None of that is what stayed with me most from our conversation.
When Carroll and I sat down, we moved past painting fairly quickly and into something I rarely get the chance to discuss on the podcast: fatherhood. Longtime listeners know I ask women artists about motherhood often — how it reshapes a practice, what it costs, what it clarifies. I had never really had the opportunity to ask a man the same questions, with the same seriousness, until this conversation. Carroll is the father of two grown children who've built their own creative and public lives — the writer and actress Lena Dunham, and the writer and activist Cyrus Dunham — and he spoke openly about what it actually meant to sustain a marriage, raise a family, and keep making ambitious, uncompromising work across four decades, without treating any of those things as competing for the same finite attention.
What I keep coming back to is how undramatic he made it sound. Not effortless — he was clear that none of it was effortless — but sustainable, in the way a life has to be sustainable if it's going to last fifty years instead of five. There's a version of the "creative genius" story that treats family as an obstacle to the work, something a serious artist has to choose against. Carroll's version was quieter than that, and more honest: the work and the life were never really separate projects. They were the same one.
That's the thread running through most of what we cover on The Art Career, even when the subject is a museum retrospective instead of a dinner table. The question was never really "how do you make important paintings." It was "how do you build a life that can hold painting, for decades, alongside everything else that matters." Carroll answered it as honestly as anyone we've had on the show.
It remains one of the most thoughtful and generous conversations in The Art Career archive, and one that feels just as relevant today as when we first recorded it.
I hope you enjoy revisiting it.
— Emily
Listen to the full conversation with Carroll Dunham on The Art Career.