Philadelphia lost one of its own today. Danny Simmons Jr. — painter, poet, philanthropist, and the man who built Rush Arts on Old York Road in Logan — died on June 15, 2026. He was 72. The family has not announced a cause of death.
The name carries weight in two cities. In New York, he was the oldest Simmons brother — the quiet one who watched Russell build Def Jam and Joey become Rev Run of Run-D.M.C. while he built something altogether different: a life in paint, a gallery, a movement. But Philadelphia was where Danny Simmons chose to plant himself, and this city felt the full gravity of that decision until the very end.
Danny Simmons: The Man Who Moved Here on Purpose
He didn’t have to come here. By 2015, Danny Simmons had already opened two galleries in downtown Manhattan, co-founded the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation with his brothers, and helped conceive Def Poetry Jam — the spoken word movement that earned a Tony Award on Broadway and a Peabody Award for its run on HBO. He could have stayed in New York. Instead, Northern Liberties reminded him of Brooklyn, and that was enough. He found an old bank building on Old York Road in Logan and made it Rush Arts Philadelphia: a community center, a gallery, a room where artists who had no room could finally show their work.
That move was not sentimental. It was strategic. Danny Simmons had spent his career building the institutions he wished had existed when he was coming up. He had spent years unable to find galleries willing to show his work as an emerging Black painter, and he understood that if that was his experience, it was everyone’s experience. Rush Arts was the answer to that problem. Rush Arts Philadelphia extended that same logic to a city he believed was ready — and he was right. The center actively supported Philadelphia artists through exhibitions, education programming, and receptions right up until last month.
The Danny Simmons Philadelphia Mural Legacy in Germantown and North Philly
The work he left on the walls of this city will outlast any gallery. Danny Simmons served on the Mural Arts Philadelphia board from 2022 to 2025 and led four mural projects in Germantown and North Philadelphia — dense, electric compositions that carried the full vocabulary of his Neo-African Abstract Expressionism into the street. His visual language was unmistakable at scale: dots, textile patterns, tribal markings, color fields laid against deep black. The Seeker, one of his Philadelphia murals documented here at dosage MAGAZINE, stands as a direct example of how completely he embedded himself in the life of this city.
Jane Golden, founder and executive director of Mural Arts Philadelphia, put it without qualification: “Danny was one of a kind, and he leaves very big shoes to fill in our city and our world.” His work entered permanent collections at Woodmere and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 2019, he was appointed to the Philadelphia Museum of Art African American Collections Committee. He received the Mural Arts Philadelphia Visionary Artist Award in 2023 alongside Philadelphia’s first poet laureate Sonia Sanchez — two people who had each, in their own way, remade how Philadelphia understood itself.
Danny Simmons Philadelphia, Hollis Queens, and a Life Built From Nothing
He was born Daniel Simmons Jr. on August 17, 1953, in Hollis, Queens. His father, Daniel Simmons Sr., was a truant officer and Black history professor who wrote poetry. His mother Evelyn was a teacher who painted as a hobby. The household was saturated with it before he knew what to call any of it. He earned a degree in social work from NYU and a master’s in public finance from Long Island University, then spent years working New York’s Bureau of Child Support while quietly carrying a heroin addiction he would battle for two decades.
When it was gone, he painted. He quit his job, leaned into abstraction, and started building the infrastructure that didn’t exist. Rush Arts launched in 1995. His novel Three Days as the Crow Flies, a fictional account of the 1980s New York art scene, came out in 2004. Five poetry books followed, and a collaboration with jazz bassist Ron Carter on Blue Note Records. His work found its way into the collections of the United Nations, Chase Manhattan Bank, the Schomburg Center for Black Culture, and the Smithsonian — and none of it stopped him from showing up in Logan on a Tuesday to hang a student’s painting on a gallery wall.
dosage MAGAZINE covered Rush Arts Philadelphia’s 30th anniversary celebration last year — an event that was as much about the artists Danny Simmons had lifted over three decades as it was about the milestone itself. That was always the point. Russell Simmons, announcing the loss of his brother, wrote what may be the most honest accounting of who Danny Simmons was: “He was the true artist in the family. Joey and I went into music — him as a poet and rapper, me as a producer — but he was the one who created from the deepest place. His poetry, art, and ideas shaped how we think and gave us the freedom to dream beyond limits.”
He called Danny his best friend. They spoke every day.
Danny Simmons Jr. is survived by his wife, Keia Simmons, and his son, Jamel Simmons. The murals remain on the walls of Germantown and North Philadelphia. Rush Arts Philadelphia, the institution he built in Logan, is his most direct gift to this city. The artists he spent a lifetime lifting carry the rest.
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