From the street, it’s hard to miss the neon sign reading black owned that appears in the upstairs window of V. Joy Simmons’s Los Angeles home. To the left of that sign is her front door, which has stained-glass windows depicting an elegantly dressed Black couple. When she was designing her home in the 1990s, Simmons commissioned Varnette Honeywood, working in collaboration with Joyce Dudnick, to make those stained-glass windows. “I always wanted stained glass doors because you used to see that in rich people’s houses back in the day,” Simmons told ARTnews this past summer. “When I built this house, I wanted that.”There are even more artful treasures inside the two-story house, located in Baldwin Hills. Simmons often keeps more than 150 objects on display, from small-scale pieces sitting on shelves to medium-size lithographs and paintings hanging on the walls. And there are towering sculptures all around: Upon entering the house, one of the first things you see is a set of columns that Lauren Halsey painted in 2019; one side of the columns portrays women, the other, men.Simmons started collecting in the 1970s, when she was in her first year of medical school at UCLA. Back then, her first purchase—a 1973 lithograph by Elizabeth Catlett, titled Which Way?, showing a Black woman’s face looking in three directions—cost $50. “That’s never come down,” she said.A stained-glass mosaic by Varnette Honeywood and Joyce Dudnick adorns Simmons’s front door.Photo Amanda Villarosa for ARTnewsLauren Halsey’s site-specific installation on the columns in the foyer. Photo Amanda Villarosa for ARTnewsWorks by Romare Bearden, Robert Colescott, Betye Saar, Raymond Saunders, and Howardena Pindell, whose 1974 mixed-media abstraction hangs in her bedroom, also form cornerstones of Simmons’s collection. But artists from the next generation whose work she has long supported, like Kerry James Marshall, Mark Bradford, Kehinde Wiley, and Carrie Mae Weems, have also become core to her holdings. Near a 1989 Marshall painting hangs a portrait by Christen Austin and a photograph by Thandiwe Muriu, both of whom are more than three decades younger than Marshall. “I try to have a young artist in conversation with a Kerry James Marshall,” Simmons said. She has always been fond of intergenerational juxtapositions like this: Marshall’s work once hung not far from Bearden’s.Elsewhere around the house is a who’s who of major Black artists: Henry Taylor, Noah Davis, Lyle Ashton Harris, Pope.L, Shinique Smith, vanessa german, and Deborah Roberts, among many others. The rare work in the collection by a white artist is an Andy Warhol screen print from the 1985 “Reigning Queens” series representing Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland.Patrick Martinez’s Happy Birthday MLK‚ 2025, rests on a coffee table in the living room.Photo Amanda Villarosa for ARTnewsDaniel Joseph Martinez’s I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White (1993) in the stairwell.Photo Amanda Villarosa for ARTnewsSimmons has an eye for unusual finds. Near a coffee table displaying a sculpture by Patrick Martinez resembling a birthday cake for Martin Luther King Jr., there sits a church pew, where a couch might normally be. The reclaimed object was part of a commission Genevieve Gaignard did for the Prospect New Orleans triennial; the artist also made an installation for one of the home’s bathrooms. In the backyard is a bottle tree sculpture by Dominique Moody. The work is part of a long tradition in the American South, with roots in Western Africa and the Caribbean, in which blue glass bottles placed on tree branches are meant to ward off evil spirits. And in the stairwell to the second floor, there are upscaled versions of Daniel Joseph Martinez’s museum admission tags for the 1993 Whitney Biennial. Those tags collectively spell out the phrase i can’t imagine ever wanting to be white. At the top of the stairs is a two-sided family portrait in the shape of a waist-high front gate that Simmons commissioned from Glen Wilson.Simmons never cared if she exhibited her collection differently from others, or if she was buying artists others wouldn’t buy. “I wanted my collection to look the way I wanted my collection to look, and I didn’t want anything that anyone else had,” she said.Patrick Martinez’s Black Owned (After Marshall), 2017, above Simmons’s garage. Photo Amanda Villarosa for ARTnewsSimmons has lived in South Los Angeles almost her entire life. Her family moved to the View Park neighborhood in 1963; the family still owns her childhood home. She was a member of the first 10th-grade class when Crenshaw High School opened in 1968.At Crenshaw High, she began taking an interest in the arts. She took classes with artist Alonzo Davis, who died this past January, and acquired his work years later. As part of one of those classes, 16-year-old Simmons made an assemblage that she thought was “pretty fantastic.” Davis politely disagreed, telling her, “Simmons, you’ve got an eye, but maybe you should be a collector.”A few years later, during her freshman year at Stanford University, Simmons paid a visit to her aunt and uncle, Janet and Ron Carter, who lived in New York. Janet, who died in 2000, was an early board member of the Studio Museum in Harlem; Ron is an acclaimed jazz bassist. They had works by Jack Whitten, Melvin Edwards, and Howardena Pindell, among many others. “That was the first time I was able to see art in a home like this, and that’s when I said, ‘This is it,’” she told me of her decision to become a collector. She would soon buy the Catlett print, and in the coming years become a frequent visitor to Brockman Gallery, an influential LA space known for its support of artists of color that Davis cofounded with his brother in 1967.The works in Simmons’s living room take on a new perspective when seen from the second floor.Photo Amanda Villarosa for ARTnewsSimmons made frequent trips to the Carters’ home during her time off from school, immersing herself in their social circle and seeing important exhibitions for Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence. Her uncle often hosted joint birthday parties with Edwards, and artists like Valerie Maynard, Merton Simpson, and Terry Adkins were also frequent visitors. After her first year of medical school, she even took the summeroff to live with them while she worked as a flight attendant for Trans World Airlines. (A furlough brought on by a recession swayed her to return to medical school.)Janet Carter hosted fabulous soirees and brought together a community of artists, curators, and collectors. Simmons has carried on her work, making her own home a locus for the LA arts community. EJ Hill recently held a book signing in Simmons’s home for a new monograph, and Lauren Halsey’s Summaeverythang community center staged a fundraiser there. A couple years ago, Simmons even hosted a reception for Koyo Kouoh, the late curator who was set to organize the 2026 Venice Biennale, when she visited LA from South Africa.“Janet Carter taught me about not only being a collector and acquiring the work, but what it means to be a patron,” Simmons said. “You had people over. You entertained. You had these soirees. You supported artists when they needed stuff.”Moreover, Simmons added, “Acquiring is one thing, but there is a bigger purpose to be had.”Simmons with her first purchase, Elizabeth Catlett’s Which Way? (1973).Photo Amanda Villarosa for ARTnewsSimmons started attending UCLA Medical School in the mid-1970s, as part of a rising cohort of young Black physicians. She estimated that she may have been only the tenth Black woman to graduate from her program. For more than four decades now, she has been a practicing radiologist.She moved to her current house in 1979, a year after she got married. She was completing her medical residency at the time, and her daughters, Naima and Amy, were born not long after. But when she got divorced in 1987, she wanted a fresh start and decided to rebuild the house from scratch. She took an architecture class at UCLA and a construction class at Los Angeles City College, which was down the street from the medical center where she was working. Simmons recalled thinking, “I want the girls to be able to see that you can do something as a single woman.” To others, her vision may have seemed a bit odd, but she said she felt “blessed that people bought into my little dream—I was just praying I could pull this thing off.”Simmons designed her home so that her collection hang can always be in a state of change, as she frequently loans works to institutional shows. She estimates she moves things around three to four times a year. This past summer, when I visited her home, Mickalene Thomas’s rhinestone-and-paint portrait of a Black woman, Look at What You’ve Become (2005), had recently come back from the artist’s survey at the Broad in LA. Simmons said she was also focused on taking works out of storage that she hadn’t seen in a while, like a Lorna Simpson diptych from 2013 and an undated Raymond Saunders collage she bought decades ago. Two sculptures by Dominique Moody that long guarded the home’s back doors are taking a break from being on view. “I pay more for storage than I do my mortgage,” Simmons said, her infectious laughter filling the room.A 1992 site-specific mural by Keith Williams in Simmons’s patio.Photo Amanda Villarosa for ARTnewsShe currently buys around 10 works a year, and insists on seeing them in person before committing to the purchase. “None of the pieces in here were acquired just by a PDF or anything like that. I have to see the work. I have to feel it,” she said, describing her collecting habits as “instinctive.”“If there’s a through line,” she continued, “it’s supporting artists and having the antennas up to be able to spot talent.” Around the time she started collecting, she saw that her peers were going after the greats, like Bearden, Lawrence, and Catlett, so she decided to turn her attention to emerging artists. Early in an artist’s career, she said, is “when you have an impact just by acquiring the art and supporting them that way.”Around 2011, on the recommendation of artist Mark Steven Greenfield, Simmons visited a solo exhibition by Kenturah Davis. Simmons was blown away, remembering that she said to herself, “this is a talent.” She called Davis and asked if she would make a portrait of her mother. At the time, Davis was unsure about her trajectory as an artist, but Simmons encouraged her.“It meant everything,” Davis told me of that commission. “I couldn’t fully grasp it at the time because I was still trying to figure out how to be an artist and make a career of it.” Davis still had a full-time job at that point, but the commission empowered her to leave it. Simmons’s patronage “helped me branch out,” Davis said, adding, “it’s amazing how she just follows her intuition with work she likes and her commitment to supporting artists she thinks are doing interesting things.”Glen Wilson’s Adorations (Generational Joy!), 2023, doubles as a gate leading to the second floor. Photo Amanda Villarosa for ARTnewsBeyond her collecting, Simmons, like her aunt Janet, has been an important patron both for the LA art community and nationally. In 2024 she joined the six-member board of the California African American Museum (CAAM), appointed by the governor. Her daughter, Naima J. Keith, is a former deputy director and chief curator at CAAM, but Simmons’s history with the institution dates back to the ’90s. She is also a commissioner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and has served on the boards of the Santa Monica Museum of Art (now the ICA LA), LAXART (now the Brick), the Mistake Room, and the Watts House Project, as well as her alma mater Stanford.When wildfires devastated parts of Los Angeles at the beginning of 2025, including the historically Black community of Altadena, Simmons knew that CAAM had to do something. She called up the museum’s executive director, Cameron Shaw, insisting that CAAM be responsive.The entertainment room features Chinaedu Nwadibia’s Confined to the Troposphere, 2022 (left), and Genevieve Gaignard’s Compton Contrapposto, 2016 (center).Photo Amanda Villarosa for ARTnews“It was just heartbreaking,” Simmons said about watching the wildfires. She recalled thinking, “We have to do this exhibition, and we have to do it now. We can’t wait until the fall. We need to get this out there now.” The exhibition, titled “Ode to ’Dena: Black Artistic Legacies of Altadena,” opened in April, just a few months after the fires, highlighting the works of artists who had once called Altadena home, like John Outterbridge and Charles White, as well as contemporary artists who had been impacted, including Davis, Moody, La Monte Westmoreland, and Martine Syms.In this instance, Simmons said she didn’t mind being “a pushy board member.” She told Shaw that she would help find the funds to realize the exhibition because CAAM had to be the first one to tell the story—another LA institution shouldn’t beat them to it.“When the fire happened, she was in a position to quickly recognize what could be done,” Davis said. “I’m still amazed at how quickly they were able to pull this thing together, but that sort of flexibility, imagination, and assertiveness even to make something happen—she’s so good at that. Joy is a real visionary to recognize where to find opportunity, even in the face of a lot of loss.”