Simone Leigh (born 1967) is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States.[1][2] She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism.[3] Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society.[2][4] Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history.[5] She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.[6]
Early life and education
Simone Leigh was born in 1967 in Chicago, Illinois, to Jamaican missionaries.[7] She grew up on Chicago's South Side in a highly segregated neighborhood. Describing her childhood in an interview, Leigh stated "Everyone was black, so I grew up feeling like my blackness didn’t predetermine anything about me. It was very good for my self-esteem. I still feel lucky that I grew up in that crucible."[8]
"I came to my artistic practice via the study of philosophy, cultural studies, and a strong interest in African and African American art, which has imbued my object and performance-based work with a concern for the ethnographic, especially the way it records and describes objects."[11]
After graduating, Leigh planned to become a social worker. After an internship at the National Museum of African Art and stint at a studio near Charlottesville, Virginia, she embraced art as a career. In 2015 she remarked "I tried not to be an artist for a really long time but at a certain point I realized I was not going to stop doing it."[3]
Leigh combines her training in American ceramics with an interest in African pottery, using African motifs which tend to have modernist characteristics. Though she considers herself to be primarily a sculptor, she recently has been involved in social sculpture, or social practice work that engages the public directly.[11] Her objects often employ materials and forms traditionally associated with African art, and her performance-influenced installations create spaces where historical precedent and self-determination co-mingle.[11] She describes this combination representing "a collapsing of time."[12] Her work has been described as part of a generation's reimagining of ceramics in a cross-disciplinary context.[13] She has given artist lectures in many institutions nationally[14][15][16] and internationally, and has taught in the ceramics department of the Rhode Island School of Design.[17]
Leigh lecturing in 2013
In October 2020, Leigh was selected to represent the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale.[18] She is the first black woman to do so. She was awarded a Golden Lion for her work Brick House in the main exhibition.[19] The film Conspiracy, featured in her solo show at the Biennale, was co-produced with filmmaker and visual artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich.[20]
During her residency at the New Museum, Leigh founded an organization called Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter (BWAforBLM), a collective formed in direct response to the murder of Philando Castille, and in protest against other similar injustices against black lives.[11]
Simone Leigh is the creator of the Free People's Medical Clinic a social practice project created with Creative Time in 2014.[25] A reenactment of the Black Panther Party's initiative of the same name.[11] The installation was located in a 1914 Bed-Stuy brownstone called the Stuyvesant Mansion, previously owned by notable African-American doctor Josephine English (1920–2011). As an homage to this history, Leigh created a walk-in health center with yoga, nutrition and massage sessions, staffed by volunteers in 19th-century nurse uniforms.[26]
The Brick House sculpture's torso combines the forms of a skirt and a clay Mousgoumdomed hut (or teleuk)[45] while the sculpture's head is crowned with an afro framed by cornrow braids.[46] This 5,900-pound bronzebust is of a Black woman with a torso standing 16 feet high and 9 feet in diameter at its base.[46]Brick House is the inaugural commission for the High LinePlinth, a landmark destination for major public artworks in New York City since 2019, and is part of a series of art installations that will rotate every eighteen months[47] and the first space on the High Line dedicated solely to new commissions of contemporary art.[5] The content of Leigh's sculpture directly contrasts the location in which it is sited in New York since it is situated where "glass-and-steel towers shoot up from among older industrial-era brick buildings, and where architectural and human scales are in constant negotiation."[46] In 2020, another original Brick House was permanently installed in another urban location (albeit surrounded by a patch of grass) at the key gateway to the University City campus of University of Pennsylvania (near corner of 34th Street and Woodland Walk adjacent to Penn's School of Design).[48]Brick House is the first piece in Leigh's Anatomy of Architecture collection, an ongoing body of work where the artist combines architectural forms from regions as varied as West Africa and the Southern United States with the human body.[49]Brick House combines a number of different architectural styles: "Batammaliba architecture from Benin and Togo, the teleuk dwellings[50] of the Mousgoum people of Cameroon and Chad, and the restaurant named Mammy's Cupboard located on US Highway 61 south of Natchez, Mississippi."[46]
The Waiting Room
The Waiting Room was exhibited at the New Museum in New York City from June to September 2016.[2] This exhibition honors Esmin Elizabeth Green, who died from blood clots after sitting in a waiting room of a Brooklyn hospital for 24 hours, and provides an alternative vision of health care shaped by female, African-American experience.[51] In an interview with the Guardian, Leigh says "obedience is one of the main threats to black women's health" and "what happened to Green is an example of the lack of empathy people have towards the pain of black women."[51]The Waiting Room involved public and private care sessions from different traditions of medicine such as herbalism, meditation rooms, movement studios, and other holistic approaches to healthcare. Outside of museum hours this exhibition became "The Waiting Room Underground" providing free, private workshops outside of the public eye, an homage to the healthcare work of the Black Panthers and the United Order of Tents.[51] Additionally this exhibition featured lectures; workshops on self-defense, home economics, and self-awareness; Taiko drumming lessons for LGBTQ youth, and summer internships with the museum for teens.[51] This work came after and is related to Leigh's previous project Free People's Medical Clinic (2014).[52]
Recognition
Leigh is a recipient of the Venice Biennale Golden Lion (2022); the Studio Museum in Harlem's Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (2017); John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2016); Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2016); Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2016); and A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art (2016).[11]Guggenheim Fellowship (2012), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, Creative Capital Grantee, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Micheal Richards Award (2012), Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Artist-in-Residence The Studio Museum in Harlem (2010–11), NYFA Fellowship, Art Matters Foundation Grant (2009), Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2018), The Hugo Boss Prize (2018) (a $100,000 award facilitated by the Guggenheim Museum that ranks among the world's top art prizes).[27][53][54][5]
In 2023, Leigh's sculpture Stick (2019), sold for $2.7 million at Christie's in New York, a record for the artist.[58] Her previous auction record, a life-size mixed media female head titled Birmingham (2012), was sold for $2.2 million at Sotheby’s in New York in 2022.[59]
My Dreams, My Works Must Wait Till After Hell (2011), by Simone Leigh and Chitra Ganesh, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.;[80] and Whitney Museum, New York[81]
^Steven Nelson, "Smone Leigh: Acts of Transformation." In Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World, edited by Steven Nelson and Huey Copeland. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2023: pages 18–33.
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