Simone Leigh is first Black woman to represent U.S.
Simone Leigh, a Brooklynbased sculptor whose largescale works address the social histories and subjective experiences of Blackwomen, will represent the United States at the next Venice Biennale in April 2022.
The first African American woman to receive this honor, among the art world’s most prestigious, Leigh was selected by the U. S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs on the recommendation of museum professionals and artists convened by the National Endowment for the Arts.
“I feel like I’m a part of a larger group of artists and thinkers who have reached critical mass,” Leigh, 52, said. “And despite the really horrific climate that we’ve reached, it still doesn’t distract me from the fact of how amazing it is to be a Black artist right now.”
The last two U.S. representatives to the Biennale— Martin Puryear, also a sculptor, in 2019, and Mark Bradford, a painter, in 2017— are Black artists, as well. The next edition was originally scheduled for May 2021, but the pandemic forced it to be postponed a year.
Working primarily in ceramics, Leigh has long elevated the labor of Black women. She has fused representations of their bodies with vernacular architectural forms from Africa or utilitarian vessels such as jugs and pitchers, made and used throughout the African diaspora.
These distinctive figures, sometimes faceless and veering into abstraction, have been holding court in New York recently, from the 2019 Whitney Biennial to a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum after the artist won the institution’s Hugo Boss Prize in 2018. Leigh’s majestic 16-foot-tall bronze bust, titled “Brick House,” gazing down Tenth Avenue fromthe High Line Plinth since 2019, celebrates Black female beauty and strength — not often commemorated in the public sphere. (Kenyan American artist Wangechi Mutu recently offered another alternative to monuments in her sculptures of female figures for the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
Leigh’s exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion, a 1930s Palladian-style space with a rotunda and Doric columns, is co- commissioned by Jill Medvedow, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and its chief curator, Eva Respini, who is also organizing the artist’s first survey exhibition at the Boston museum in 2023.
Medvedow said she could not think of an artist better suited to representing the United States at this time. “The idea of Simone Leigh in Venice does disrupt the narrative of 400-plus years of American history,” she said. “Her sculptures are really commanding in the space they occupy. The scale and presence and magnificence of her figures are so demanding of visibility.”
The neoclassical building sits inside the Giardini, the Venice park that hosts the national pavilions. Leigh plans to do an outdoor monumental bronze statuary in the forecourt, framed by the building’s architectural colonnade, and a series of sculptures and installations.