Simone Leigh
Simone Leigh is an American artist from Chicago with a studio in Brooklyn. 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. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society. Leigh has said that her work is focused on "Black female subjectivity," with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
Early life and education
Simone Leigh was born in 1967 in Chicago, Illinois, to Jamaican immigrants who came to the United States as missionaries for the Church of the Nazarene. She grew up mostly in South Shore on Chicago's South Side. Her neighborhood had become segregated by white flight beginning in the 1960s; nonetheless, she viewed the South Side of Chicago as a wonderful place for a black person to grow up. 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." She went to Kenwood Academy High School and like her three siblings excelled in her academics.Although her parents wanted her to go to a stricter religious school and live at home, Leigh chose Earlham College, associated with the Quakers, in Richmond, Indiana. She then became estranged from her parents and worked to put herself through college. She received a BA in art with a minor in philosophy in 1990.
Career
"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."After graduating in 1990, 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. She moved to Williamsburg in Brooklyn and met her future husband an art photographer. As a young mother, she worked intently to get showings and galleries interested in her ceramics work but it was not until 2001 that she began to call herself an artist. 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."
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. 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. She describes this combination representing "a collapsing of time." Her work has been described as part of a generation's reimagining of ceramics in a cross-disciplinary context. She has given artist lectures in many institutions nationally and internationally, has taught in the ceramics department of the Rhode Island School of Design and has fired ceramics as a visiting artist at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado.
In October 2020, Leigh was selected to represent the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale. She was the first black woman to do so. Her showing of works known as a presentation was entitled "Sovereignty". She was also awarded the Golden Lion for her work Brick House in the general exhibition. Leigh created her first portrait sculpture, Sharifa, with Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, a Harlem cultural historian, as her subject. The film Conspiracy, featured in her solo show at the Biennale, was co-produced with filmmaker and visual artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich.
Works and critical reception
Leigh has exhibited internationally including: MoMA PS1, Walker Art Center, Studio Museum in Harlem, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Hammer Museum, The Kitchen, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Tilton Gallery, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, SculptureCenter, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, L'appartement 22 in Rabat, Morocco, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and the Association for Visual Arts Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa. Leigh organized an event with a group of women artists, who performed in "Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter" part of her solo exhibition, The Waiting Room at the New Museum in 2016. Her large bronze sculpture of a woman, Sharifa, became the first sculpture by a living artist to be permanently displayed in the sculpture garden of the Art Institute of Chicago, after appearing at the Venice Biennial. Leigh's work was selected among "the most important and relevant work" by curators Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley for the 2019 Whitney Biennial.During her residency at the New Museum, Leigh founded an organization called Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, a collective formed in direct response to the murder of Philando Castille, and in protest against other similar injustices against black lives.
Simone Leigh is the creator of the Free People's Medical Clinic a social practice project created with Creative Time in 2014. A reenactment of the Black Panther Party's initiative of the same name. The installation was located in a 1914 Bed-Stuy brownstone called the Stuyvesant Mansion, previously owned by notable African-American doctor Josephine English. 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.
She is the recipient of many awards, including: a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Venice Biennale Golden Lion ; The Herb Alpert Award; a Creative Capital grant; a Blade of Grass Fellowship; the Studio Museum in Harlem's Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize; the Guggenheim Museum's Hugo Boss Prize; United States Artists fellowship; and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award. She was named one of Artsy Editorial's "Most Influential Artists" of 2018. Her work has been written about in many publications, including Art in America, Artforum, Sculpture Magazine, Modern Painters, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Small Axe, and Bomb magazine.
Simone Leigh's work and practice is the subject of a 2023 monograph, edited by Eva Respini. The monograph includes essays and reflections on Leigh's work from a number of Black scholars, including from Hortense Spillers, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Dionne Brand, among others.