“I am charting a history of change and adaptation through objects and gestures, and the unstoppable forward movement of Black women.” Simone Leigh once wrote.
The artist's current exhibition (May 26–Jan 20, 2025) is a major retrospective of her entire two-decade career exposing the Black femme experience. Organised with ICA Boston, it's currently being hosted at the California African American Museum (CAAM), and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) respectively.
The shows include the works alluding to AfriCOBRA art movement, a poem by the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize, Gwendolyn Brooks, and the iconic chandelier sculptures formed with bulbous breast forms that have become a hallmark of Leigh's figural sculptures. Leigh captivates use through a broad use of mediums including: ceramic, marble, French clay, bronze and video.
Some of Leigh's sculptures are colossal (D’mba is twenty-five feet high and Leigh’s sculpture Brick House (2019) is a sixteen-foot bronze bust of a woman which towered on the High Line in New York at 30th Street and 10th Avenue during 2020. Two years later, she impressed visitors of the 59th Venice Biennale with her exhibition, Simone Leigh: Sovereignty.
Leigh's work was also included in the Biennale’s central exhibition The Milk of Dreams, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Participant. Leigh's exhibition with CAMM and LACMA, places her biennale pieces alongside works dating back to the beginning of her career in 2000. Accompanied by a major monograph, it offers visitors a timely opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of the artist's complex and profoundly moving work.
Simone Leigh at LACMA & CAAM
Image courtesy of the artist and galleries
Exposing the Black femme experience
Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1967, Leigh has cultivated a visceral vernacular inspired by a variety of hand-made processes drawn from across the African diaspora. She has had one-person museum exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, among others. This particular retrospective sets itself apart from the others by being the first comprehensive survey of her richly layered practice, and her most extensive exhibition on the West Coast to date.
Visitors to LACMA can expect at least one of Leigh's legendary large-scale chandelier sculptures. Titled Trophallaxis (2008–17), the orb-like structure honours the meaning behind its name: a biological exchange from one organism to another. With this nomenclature, Leigh casts breast-like forms from watermelons. Each bulbous form is suspended from the ceiling and attached with antennae. There are no identical shapes because some of them have cracked gold plated areolae, boot-prints, lattices, and irregularities. This work showcases the change and continuity in Leigh’s chandelier works and breast forms that have become a hallmark of her figural sculptures.
When it comes to video installations, Leigh has collaborated with various filmmakers and music artists to create insightful films honing in on the Black femme experience. In Breakdown (2011), Leigh and Liz Magic Laser mined “female hysteria” scenes from soap operas, movies, and reality TV shows. The mezzo-soprano opera singer Alicia Hall Moran was invited to sing the scripts using historical African American song styles. The final film (on view at CAAM) centres and encourages emotional release for those occupying a Black femme embodiment.
Simone Leigh, Trophallaxis, 2008–17. Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami
m y d reams, m y w orks m ust w ait t ill a fter h el l (2011), is a collaborative work between Leigh and Chitra Ganesh, under their duo moniker, Girl. In the 14-minute-long film, an original score by composer Kaoru Watanabe plays as the viewer is presented with the back of a Black femme figure, while the subject’s head is submerged in gravel. Shown at CAAM, the piece holds a passive tension, as the subject’s inhalation and exhalation are the only movements taking place throughout the entire film, while the stones appear to consume their head. The title references a poem by the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize, Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) called “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell” (1963).
A visceral display of human experience and history
Over the past two decades, the in-demand artist has distinguished herself with her ongoing exploration of Black female-identified subjectivity. Describing her work as auto-ethnographic, Leigh's salt-glazed ceramic and bronze sculptures frequently allude to nuances of African art and architecture. This enriches each piece with context from different historical periods, geographies, or traditions. In 2023, she told WBUR of her desire to present "the role of Black feminist theory" in her work.
The key to understanding Leigh's pieces is to appreciate the multilayered concepts, histories and human experiences thriving beneath their surfaces. Kool-Aid (2011/3023), for example, incorporates multiple blown-glass, breast-like vessels that celebrate the values established by AfriCOBRA collective. Emerging in Chicago out of the 1960s Black Arts Movement, AfriCOBRA is an acronym for African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists, and was founded to establish a Black aesthetic.
Simone Leigh sculpture exhibit. Courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery
© Simone Leigh, photo by Timothy Schenck
Displayed at CAAM, the piece's title references the collective's poetic manifesto centred political ideologies along with visual elements, such as mimesis, repetition, symmetry, and, most significantly, colour, and used these devices to advance Black nationalist ideologies of that era. As their manifesto states: “We want things to shine to have the rich lustre of a just-washed ‘Fro’ . . . We try to create images that appeal to the senses—not to the intellect . . . Coolade colours for coolade images for the super real people.” Leigh's sculpture honours the manifesto's intent for lyrical use of colour, and Black collectivity.
Sculpture in protest
In 2022, Leigh staged a public burning of an eight-foot paper effigy of an insulting photograph taken in 1882, which parodied the writer Oscar Wilde as a Black woman. The burning took place on the waterfront near her studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and the effigy stood for racist images in general. The event was inspired by a visit she made to a carnival in France's Martinique, which climaxes with the ritual burning of an effigy of the Vaval, the carnival king, who personifies the bad things that have happened during the past year.
It wasn't a coincidence that Leigh created a stoneware sculpture named Martinique around the same time she burnt the effigy. Doused in a brilliant shade of blue, it references a nineteenth-century monument of Joséphine Bonaparte, the first wife of former French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Joséphine grew up on the island of Martinique (a French colony in the Caribbean at the time), and was central to extending the practice of enslavement there. Protesters decrying racism beheaded the original statue in 1991 and splashed it with red paint; in 2020, activists brought down the monument altogether. Reimagined in new guise, Leigh’s Martinique gathers, both materially and metaphorically, multiple time spans into a single static form.
Leigh addresses colonialism again in Cupboard (2022), gold-sheened, bronze sculpture fashioned with a wide, pannier-style raffia skirt and woman’s torso. Showing at CAAM these domelike forms, Leigh has pointed to the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, which established the hut within a colonial iconography. Effectively reenacting the colonialist project while it was still ongoing, France mounted the exposition to display the cultures and peoples of the lands then under colonial control. In Cupboard, Leigh brings these varied histories to the surface in a form that recalls gathering places or dwellings, topped here by a cowrie shell, another of the artist’s recurring motifs.
Simone Leigh, Martinique, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery
© Simone Leigh, photo by Timothy Schenck
Gazing inward
Another greatly anticipated piece on view at LACMA is Last Garment (2022): a bronze sculpture of a woman, washing clothing by hand in a pool of dark, still water. Behind her is a window looking out onto Boston Harbor. In both form and title, the work addresses a stereograph by American photographer C. H. Graves’s (1867-1943) called Mammy’s Last Garment (taken in Jamaica in 1879). Stereographs like these were made for a growing Anglophone Caribbean tourism industry, encouraging white travellers to visit the colonised British West Indies.
Stereotypical images of this type, often created without the full consent of the people depicted, illustrate the subjects’ lack of sovereignty over their own representation. Leigh counters this voyeuristic canon by centering the anonymous woman in a large reflecting pool, and using over 800 individual rosettes for the figure’s hair. The floral motif reminds viewers of one of Leigh's earliest figurative works called Overburdened with Significance (2011). It features a bust where a woman's facial features are partly obscured by a majestic, towering hair-do composed of hundreds of tightly coiled rosettes).
Simone Leigh, Last Garment, 2022. installation view
© Simone Leigh, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, photo by Timothy Schenck
In the same WBUR article, Leigh described the stereograph and her source of inspiration as "a souvenir to circulate ideas around the Black body, Black people and what we're here to do and what we mean." The postcard has another layer of significance to Leigh as her parents are Jamaican, and she spent time there when she was a child. In an interview with the New Yorker, she said "The souvenir is a seemingly harmless object that has actually proven to be quite devastating. This one is a very racist image.” The artist subverted the image by making her protagonist an authentic representation of the time.
The model for the sculpture added another layer of personal significance. Leigh chose her close friend, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (a writer and teacher) to pose as the standing washerwoman. “There are very few projects of mine that she hasn’t been involved in,” Leigh said. When the artist was working on a video for her show at the Guggenheim Museum in 2019, she asked Rhodes-Pitts and several other friends to reenact the positions they had been in when they gave birth. “Sharifa was just leaning against the wall, thinking, and that was the start of this sculpture,” Leigh said.
The result was Rhodes-Pitts reimagined as a headless woman who was looking inside herself for reassurance. This idea of 'inward looking' is an intrinsic element of Leigh's oeuvre. As viewers at an art exhibition, we are constantly asked to internalise an artwork's meaning and decide how it affects us. But with Leigh's work, it's a two-way process and she joins us in gazing inward.
