Simone Leigh’s Five-Year Ascent Reaches a Pinnacle in L.A., but the Journey Is Not Over
Exhibition view: Simone Leigh, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (26 May 2024–20 January 2025). © Simone Leigh. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA.
There are few higher artistic honours than representing one's country at the Venice Biennale. When New York-based artist Simone Leigh presented her work in the United States Pavilion in 2022, the occasion delayed a planned career survey.
That survey finally opened in Los Angeles, concluding its three-venue national tour. While looking back over 20 years of work, including pieces shown in Venice, the exhibition reveals some lesser-known aspects of Leigh's output and suggests possible paths forward.
In 2019, curator Eva Respini invited Leigh to mount her first survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. Born in 1967 in Chicago, Leigh had steadily amassed a wide body of sculpture, video, and installation since the early 2000s, but garnered more widespread attention after winning the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize and showing at the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
Then the pandemic hit and Leigh's survey was put on hold. When she was selected to represent the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale, commissioned by the ICA Boston, her exhibition was postponed a further year.
Her Venice pavilion was lauded by many as a Biennale highlight, and her contribution to Cecilia Alemani's central exhibition The Milk of Dreams—a 16-foot-high bronze sculpture titled Brick House (2019)—earned her the prestigious Golden Lion: the first time a Black woman had won the award since the Biennale's inception.
Leigh's self-titled career survey finally opened at the ICA Boston in April 2023, culminating a five-year journey. It travelled to Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., in November before arriving in Los Angeles this May (26 May 2024–20 January 2025).
Divided between Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and California African American Museum (CAAM), the exhibition features around 30 works made between 2001 and 2024. The earliest piece, White Teeth (For Ota Benga) (2001–2004), is a steel display case filled with hundreds of glazed porcelain cones: Leigh's memorial to an enslaved Congolese man exhibited at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis, Missouri.
The artist's most recent work, Untitled (after June Jordan) (2024), dominates the exhibition at LACMA. A tower of stoneware and porcelain cowrie shells, the sculpture is named after the Jamaican-American poet and activist who died in 2002; the cowrie shell, a recurrent motif that Leigh often reconstitutes in clay, was a form of currency for which Africans were sometimes sold into transatlantic slavery.
The survey also includes several works from Leigh's Venice presentation, notably the elegant black bronze Sentinel (2022) at LACMA and the dome-shaped raffia and ceramic Cupboard (2022) at CAAM. As with many of Leigh's sculptures, these pieces push at the limits of figuration, referring more to historical figurative sculpture—from traditional African artefacts to colonialist propaganda—than to the figure itself. The human body, Leigh implies throughout her work, is a culturally mediated object. Sentinel, for instance, is immediately recognisable as a curvaceous female form, despite having no arms and a deep round bowl for a face.
At the Venice Biennale in 2022, the same dish shape loomed outside the U.S. Pavilion in a monumental bronze figure whose title—Satellite (2022)—highlighted associations of transmission and reception. The sculpture was inspired by the traditional headdresses of the Baga people of the Guinea Coast, which were used to communicate with ancestors during rituals.
Unlike these bronze pieces, Cupboard is much softer in form, its raffia work recalling Leigh's thatching of U.S. Pavilion's roof in Venice—a reference to the pseudo-West African façade of a pavilion at the 1931 Paris International Colonial Exposition. Leigh's art is rooted in Black feminist thought, and often draws from historical images derived from a colonialist vision of Blackness. The outline of Cupboard evokes the wide, European-style dresses worn by Black housekeepers in the Jim Crow South, and the bell-shaped adobe dwellings of the Mousgoum people of Cameroon.
'Like a lot of my work, this piece combines architecture with the Black body,' Leigh reflected during a walkthrough of her exhibition at CAAM prior to its public opening. Over the past three years, the artist must have explained her work—its references, its significance—hundreds, if not thousands, of times. On this final leg of the exhibition's tour, she was therefore perhaps unsurprisingly most animated when discussing newer works.
Turning from Cupboard to the adjacent Breeze Box (2022)—a stoneware bust on a decorated rectangular base that has cracked open—Leigh explained how breeze blocks are associated with makeshift architecture in the Caribbean. 'The piece was destroyed in the firing, but I loved it so much I kept it. It's one of my favourite works I've ever made.'
Leigh is an unapologetically figurative artist. 'In the early aughts,' she noted, 'we went through a period in which artists were really afraid of figuration, or any kind of direct representation of the body or any ethnic marker ... Artists of colour across the world really felt like they had to rid themselves of those things if they were going to be taken seriously.'
Clay—whether stoneware, earthenware, porcelain, or terracotta—may be Leigh's primary medium, but, as these exhibitions demonstrate, she is equally adept with bronze, glass, and even moving images. A hanging sculpture, Kool-Aid (2011/2023), consists of dozens of blown-glass, breast-shaped vessels—each filled with salt—illuminated by blue and magenta lights. The piece, included in the survey at CAAM for the first time, is inspired by the 1960s Chicago collective AfriCOBRA, whose manifesto advocated for 'coolade colours for coolade images for superreal people'.
At CAAM, three video works intersperse the sculptures. Perhaps the most affecting, Breakdown (2011), is a collaboration with artist Liz Magic Laser and mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall-Moran, who re-performed scenes of female hysteria from television shows and movies. Leigh's exhibition at LACMA includes her 24-minute black-and-white film Conspiracy (2022), made with artist and filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich. The film concludes with a woman in period dress setting fire to the raffia skirts of one of Leigh's sculptures on a stony beach—an act inspired by a French Caribbean carnival custom of burning an effigy of Vaval, King of Carnival.
The annual ritual of renewal and cleansing feels especially pertinent here, as Leigh concludes this retrospective moment in a career that has propelled her art into the upper echelons of critical and popular recognition. She will no doubt be eager to move forward in the studio, especially through works like Kool-Aid and Breakdown, which diverge from the bronze or clay figurative sculptures that many associate with her output. With this survey, Leigh demonstrates that she still has many new avenues to explore. —[O]
