A sculptor, installation and video artist primarily producing works that address the experiences of Black women, Simone Leigh has received a multitude of honors. She now adds the first African-American woman to represent the United States at the prestigious Venice Biennale to that list.
Leigh works primarily in ceramics, a medium she happened upon when studying philosophy in college. Taking a ceramics class for fun, she discovered she was good at it. Her early works were her nod to traditional face jugs, vessels with exaggerated features that were first created by enslaved people in South Carolina. Her vessels are sleek, modern representations of Black women. She describes her work as auto-ethnographic, by definition using historical research and personal experience to create wider cultural, political and social meaning.
In 2018 Leigh won the Hugo Boss Prize from the Guggenheim Foundation. It is a significant honor that includes a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum. There her large-scale works incorporating traditional materials like cowrie shells and raffia skirts representing huts, spoke to African history. The title of the show, Loophole of Retreat, came from the writings of former slave and abolitionist Harriet Jacobs.
Leigh’s selection to represent the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale has her joining the ranks of artists such as Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. Selected by the US Department of State on the recommendation of museum professionals and artists, she will be the feature artist at the American Pavilion. Since 1895 the Biennale has been one of the world’s most important art exhibitions, featuring artists from around the globe. (The 2021 Biennale was cancelled due to the global pandemic.)
Born in Chicago to Jamaican parents, Leigh now lives in New York where she became the first artist commissioned for a work on the High Line, a former railroad line transformed into an elevated park and trail way. Her sculpture Brick House is a 16-foot-tall figure of a Black woman that took two years to complete. It stands tall above the streets of Manhattan, a tribute to Black female beauty and holding her own among the towering skyscrapers.
As Leigh told CBS This Morning “I just like the idea of thinking about femininity in a different way, as something solid and enduring rather than something fragile and weak.” That’s something we can all relate to.
