“Simone Leigh” is the artist’s first museum survey, now on view on the Institute of Up to date Artwork Boston (on the Bridgitt and Bruce Evans and Karen and Brian Conway Galleries) till September 4, 2023. The ICA is situated at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, Massachusetts.
[“Simone Leigh” will tour to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (November 2023–March 2024) and a joint presentation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and California African American Museum (CAAM) in Los Angeles (June 2024–January 2025).]
Simone Leigh (b. 1967, Chicago) represented america on the 2022 Venice Biennale, one of many largest and most vital up to date artwork exhibitions on this planet. Alternatives from Leigh’s landmark Venice presentation are making their U.S. premiere in Boston, joined by key works from all through her profession, offering a holistic understanding of the artist’s manufacturing in ceramic, bronze, and video.
For over 20 years, Leigh has embraced a polyphonic inventive vocabulary that elaborates on Black feminist thought, an mental custom which values and facilities the experiences of Black girls. Knowledgeable by a rigorous consideration to a large swath of historic durations, geographies, and inventive traditions of Africa and the African diaspora, Leigh usually combines the feminine physique with home vessels or architectural components to level to unacknowledged acts of labor and care, notably amongst and for Black girls.
Clay types the premise of most of Leigh’s artworks, together with her bronze sculptures, that are first modeled in clay. The artist pushes the medium’s potentialities by scale and technique, difficult typical, hierarchical wonderful arts histories, which may nonetheless connect to ceramics associations round girls’s labor, ornament, home crafts, and utility. This exhibition traces the artist’s distinctive visible language by signature motifs, together with cowrie shells, braiding, rosettes, face vessels, and eyeless faces. By Leigh’s re-performing of those types in various supplies and scales, new constructions of thought and meanings emerge, every persistently centering the experiences and mental labor of Black femmes.
Accompanied by a serious monograph, this exhibition provides guests a well timed alternative to expertise the complicated and profoundly shifting work of this groundbreaking artist.
For extra info, see https://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/simone-leigh
[Shown above, photo by TIMOTHY SCHENCK: Simone Leigh’s Last Garment (2022), bronze, steel, metal, filtration pump, water.]