Simone Leigh

 I first encountered Simone Leigh's sculptures at the California African American Museum. She's been around awhile, and I should have known of her, but I didn't. I have a lot of excuses, but in reality, I haven't paid enough attention.

Historically, Black women's artwork has been omitted from museums and galleries. In contrast to that paradigm, Leigh has had solo shows at most iconic places of the art world including, but not limited to, the Guggenheim, the Hammer, and the Tate Modern. She has won the Guggenheim Foundation's Hugo Boss Prize and been selected for the Whitney Biennial. In 2022, Leigh became the first Black woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, winning the Golden Lion for Best Participant.

Leigh has received grants, fellowships, and residencies, including one at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2010). Her career is transnational. She has traveled and shown internationally and collaborated with Nigerian curator Bisi Silva on several projects.

Described as auto-ethnographic, her sculptural language centers on African art and material culture, performance, and Black feminism. She uses the term "Black female subjectivity" and is interested in women "who…have been left out of the archive or left out of history.”

Her "Black Feminist Aesthetics" centers Black female knowledge, using elements like cowrie shells and watermelon seeds in her work. She makes Black female bodies at monumental scale and addresses racist stereotypes and female genitalia. Thus reclaiming Black women's bodies from centuries of objectification, erasure and harm. Where our bodies were historically displayed as spectacle (for example, the Black women displayed in human zoos), Leigh presents them with agency, power, and dignity. The large scale of her pieces demands that viewers recognize Black women as powerful subjects worthy of honor and contemplation. In addition, she references historically Black activist organizations like the Black Panthers. "Leigh's practice across sculpture, video and installation, explores Black feminist thought, vernacular architecture, and the histories and lived experiences of the African diaspora, centering women's unacknowledged acts of labor, community and care" (Art Dey).

Simone Leigh gives Black feminist theory a monumental, visual, and public dimension. She transforms the insights of Black feminist thought into spaces and forms that demand recognition, care, and reverence for Black women's lives.