Simone Leigh

Born in Chicago in 1967, Simone Leigh received a BA in fine art with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, in 1990. There, she embarked on her training in traditional ceramics under the tutelage of practitioners whose lineage can be traced back to the British studio potter Bernard Leach (1887–1979). After spending a semester as an intern at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., Leigh developed an interest in engaging with the often erroneous categorization, display, and historicization of objects associated with the African diaspora.

Leigh works primarily with sculpture, installation, and video, as well as with Social Practice, to foreground black female experience. Often combining premodern techniques and materials—including lost-wax casting, salt-fired ceramics, and terracotta—with potent cultural iconographies such as cowrie shells, plantains, and tobacco leaves, Leigh creates objects and environments that reframe stereotypes associated with black women and celebrate black life. Her series Anatomy of Architecture (2016– ) occupies the liminal space between figuration and abstraction, merging forms drawn from the human body, the built environment, and the domestic realm. Employing a research-based approach grounded in materiality, Leigh renders figures and architectonic forms in bronze, ceramic, and raffia that are imbued with references and sensibilities sourced from Pan-African vernacular culture, ranging from early Egyptian terracotta vessels and the rammed-earth dwellings of the Cameroonian Mousgoum to Nigerian ibeji figures and nineteenth-century African American face jugs.

Engaging with histories of black emancipation, Leigh often invokes specific episodes drawn from the legacies of black revolutionary organizations, including the 1970s Philadelphia-based MOVE and the Black Panther Party, as well as the United Order of Tents, a secret society of black women nurses founded during the era of the Underground Railroad. In 2016, she produced the Free People’s Medical Clinic, a temporary space for collective healing and wellness services administered by and directed toward black women. Named after an initiative founded by the Black Panther Party and housed in a brownstone owned by the first African American obstetrics-and-gynecology practitioner, the project examined themes of resilience, collectivity, and self-reliance.

Leigh has had solo presentations at the Kitchen, New York (2012); Creative Time, New York (2014); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2016); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); and the High Line, New York (2019); among other venues. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Wild Girls: The Next Generation of Women Artists, Exit Art, New York (2006); Scratching the Surface VOL 1, L’appartement22, Rabat, Morocco (2008); The Future As Disruption, Kitchen (2008); 30 seconds off an Inch, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2009); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of America Art, New York (2012 and 2019); Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2013); Dak’art Biennial, Dakar, Senegal (2014); Greater New York, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York (2015); Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, New Museum of Contemporary Art (2017); Berlin Biennial (2018); and Vancouver Biennial (2019). Leigh has been recognized with a Creative Capital Award (2012) and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2016), among other honors. She received the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize, and her related exhibition, Loophole of Retreat, is being presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2019). Leigh lives and works in Brooklyn.