Words Dolores O’Donoghue
Simone Leigh, one of the most gifted and respected artists of her generation, made history as the first Black woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, 2022.
The works were commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), and are on view at the ICA until 4 September 2023. The exhibition goes on tour to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC (November 2023–March 2024), and then to a joint presentation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and California African American Museum (CAAM), where it will be on view from June 2024 to January 2025. The exhibit includes over forty key examples of the artist’s ceramics, bronzes, videos and installations, covering almost twenty years of highly disciplined production.
Leigh’s art addresses a wide range of historical periods, geographies and traditions, with specific references to vernacular architecture and hand-made processes from across the African diaspora, as well as forms traditionally associated with African art and ritual.
Over the past two decades, she has created complex and deeply moving works of art that locate issues of Black women’s subjectivity at the centre of contemporary art dialogue. This exhibition focuses on Leigh’s work in ceramic and bronze, beginning with early sculptural works and concluding with the new body of work created for the US Pavilion in Venice. It also includes key examples of works in video and installation to provide the full breadth of the artist’s practice.
The exhibition opens with the impressively scaled trophallaxis (2008/2017), a suspended sculpture composed of clusters of black terracotta and porcelain forms that resemble fruit or breasts, from which a network of fully extended car antennas protrude. The title adopts a scientific term that describes the transfer of nourishment from insects’ bodies to the collective’s larvae, drawing associations between the female body and fertility, nourishment and labour, themes developed throughout the exhibition. A subsequent gallery features a selection of Leigh’s table-top ceramic busts with their distinctive eyeless faces. In large-scale ceramic sculptures, Leigh merges the human body with traditional domestic containers, conjuring unacknowledged acts of female labour.
The intersection of architecture with the body is also central to her sculpture, seen in work such as Cupboard IX (2019), where the steel cage-like structures, left bare or covered with raffia, evoke the womb, skirts and sub-Saharan dwellings often built by women and used as gathering spaces.
Since 2018, Leigh has cast her sculptural works in bronze, creating statuary for both gallery presentations and public art commissions. Her bronzes combine figuration with domestic or architectural elements, such as in the 2019 sculpture Jug, featuring the head and torso of a woman’s body atop a large-scale vessel or jug. Through the artist’s choice of materials, these bronzes embody a state of permanence and grandeur and thus enter the dialogue around monuments in cultural memory. Leigh’s bronzes, with their overtly feminist and Black figurative references, also insist on the centrality and, indeed, the necessity of considering the agency of Black women as subjects in the cultural sphere.
The exhibition will feature Leigh’s monumental 24-foot-tall bronze Satellite (2022), sited outside the ICA campus, which serves as a beacon for the exhibition, broadcasting the ideas around self-determination that are endemic to her work.
Simone Leigh is organised by Eva Respini, ICA Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs, and Barbara Lee, Chief Curator, with Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant.
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