Simone Leigh says that her artwork is in large part an exploration of black female subjectivity and is inspired by a broad range of historical and cultural references. Leigh’s forms simultaneously evoke the sculptural traditions of West and South Africa as well as objects and Americana popularized during the Jim Crow era. Akimbo, seen here, consists of a glazed stoneware torso sitting atop a voluminous raffia skirt. The figure’s face is a void surrounded by hand-formed, porcelain rosettes. This sculpture’s bell-shaped form evokes the vernacular architecture of the Global South, the structures of the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, and the 1940s-era restaurant Mammy’s Cupboard in Mississippi where patrons enter through a door in Mammy’s skirt. This combination of references, from different times and places, has long been a feature of Leigh’s work. 

Simone Leigh was born in Chicago in 1967 and first began exhibiting her work in the early-2000s. She has had one-person museum exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Tate Gallery, London; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, among others. In 2014 she presented “The Free People’s Medical Clinic” in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, a project commissioned by Creative Time. Her work was included in the 2012 and 2019 Biennial exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Leigh is the first artist to be commissioned for the High Line Plinth; her monumental sculpture Brick House was unveiled in April 2019. This summer, Leigh is representing the United States at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.