Thursday, February, 18, 2021 – AMAZING ARTFORMS FROM SIMONE LEIGH

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THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2021

The

290th Edition
 
From Our Archives

THE WONDERFUL ARTWORKS
OF 
SIMONE LEIGH

Simone Leigh (born 1967) is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States.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 often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history.[4]

Early life and education

Leigh was born to Jamaican parents and received a BA in Art and minored in Philosophy from Earlham College 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.”[7]
The artist combines her training in American ceramics with an interest in African pottery, using African motifs which tend to have modernist characteristics. Though Leigh 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.[9] She has given artist lectures in many institutions nationally and internationally, and has taught in the ceramics department of the Rhode Island School of Design
.

In October 2020, Leigh was selected to represent the United States at the prestigious 2022 Venice Biennale.[14] She is the first black woman to do so.

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Hammer Museum
Los Angeles, California

Working across ceramics, sculpture, video, installation, and social practice, Simone Leigh examines the construction of black female subjectivity and economies of self-preservation and exchange. Her practice is largely research based and intersectional, and considers a range of sources, including ethnography, feminist discourse, folklore, and histories of political resistance.

Through ceramics, Leigh references vernacular visual traditions from the Caribbean, the American South, and the African continent, as well as the black diasporic experience dating from the Middle Passage to the present. Vessels, cowrie shells, and busts are reoccurring forms, each making symbolic reference to the black body. Each object is heavily decorated, either with pin drops of glaze or clusters of flowers covering the head or face. The repetition of shapes allows Leigh to have a sustained, temporal engagement with the formal—and gendered—history of ceramics and the cultural histories each object represents. Architecture becomes another extension of the body for Leigh; often cages constructed of steel that become either the armature for another layer of cover, or are left bare. These womb-like structures allude to sub-Saharan grass huts and rural meeting places, often built by women.

Concealment and visibility are also central to Leigh’s work, pointing to historical instances where people, especially women of color, operated in secret in order to build communities and organize against oppression. Her recent projects, such as The Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014) and The Waiting Room (2016) locate social practice within institutions that are geared towards underserved communities. Inspired by the outreach work of the Black Panther Party focused on literacy, poverty, and hunger, and radical self-care initiatives rooted in non-traditional health practices, such as herbalism, meditation, acupuncture, and yoga, these free workshops empower visitors to take back the care of their bodies from agents of capitalism.

For her first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles, Leigh presents a selection of recent ceramics and a site-specific installation, as well as a public program related to her ongoing research and work in public engagement.

LEIGH ON SITE AT STRATTON SCULPTURE STUDIOS, THE PHILADELPHIA FOUNDRY WHERE SHE IS PRODUCING NEW WORKS.

Guggenheim Museum

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Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter  and Deborah Dorff
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REPORT FROM TEXAS

Deborah Dorff, our webmaster and the person who keeps our website updated lives in Austin, Texas.  For four days she and her husband have had no electricity in their home. This afternoon she reports that their water service is out.  Texas homes are not build for cold and their power grid has collapsed.  The only shelter they can go to, you have to bring your own food and blankets. It sounds dire in Texas,  

Read the interesting stories about the Texas “GO IT ALONE” power grid.  It is an interesting story about the attitude “that we do not need other states”.  In NY and all the other states we mutually cooperate when one state needs help there is a network, not in Texas.

Hoping Deborah and Kevin are soon warm and cozy soon.

JUDITH BERDY

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