At the heart of Simone Leigh’s practice is a foregrounding of Black female subjectivity that traverses geographic and historical borders. Drawing materials and motifs from the sculptural traditions of West and South Africa as well as the American South, she calls her work “auto-ethnographic” due to its unflinching interrogation of colonial anthropology. Figure (Cobalt), executed in 2021, is emblematic of this engagement with Black representation and critical race theory through the lens of material culture. Reminiscent of the dignified busts of classical antiquity, the sculpture showcases Leigh’s interventions within the enduring art historical mode: the figure depicted is not Nefertiti or a Roman emperor but a self-assured anonymous woman with an Afro; the glazed, worked surface of stoneware takes the place of marble’s matte polish. In both its subject and media, Figure (Cobalt) disrupts the conventions of portraiture with references to the Pan-African vernacular tradition—a steadfast characteristic of Leigh’s distinctive visual language.

The bust is arguably Leigh’s most recognizable form, featuring prominently in her monumental masterwork Brick House, which was the inaugural commission for the High Line Plinth as well as a centerpiece of the 2022 Venice Biennale’s international exhibition. In this iconic pose representative of dignity and honor, Leigh’s women stand with confidence as emblems of the resilience, pride, and grace of Black femininity: their arms often outstretched, on their hips, or, as in Figure (Cobalt), crossed.

“I am charting a history of change and adaptation through objects and gesture and the unstoppable forward movement of Black women.”
—Simone Leigh

The artist’s subjects are depicted with simplified facial features and an absence of eyes that seem to deflect the viewer’s gaze. Suggesting the invisibility of interior experience rather than a specific physical form, Leigh’s abstracted figures are indicative of how colonial history has systematically anonymized African women’s labor and thought. “Though without eyes, they are not without affect. How many emotions can be read from the tilt of a chin, the slope of a nose …? Maybe they have seen too much,” the writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts queried. “Perhaps through their unseeing eyes we might comprehend the riddle of private and public and publics winding across Leigh's multiple arenas of engagement. Perhaps it is a riddle Leigh answers as easily as she sometimes offers an entry and elsewhere seals it up.”ⁱ

“I think of Black women and femmes as a kind of material culture.”
—Simone Leigh

 The salt-glaze firing of Figure (Cobalt) furthers the artist’s engagement with the aesthetic idiom of Black cultural histories. Initially trained as a ceramicist, Leigh has made her mark as a master of stoneware—a notoriously difficult medium that is often relegated to the supposedly inferior, domestic realm of “craft.” The artist was first drawn to working with clay at art school, where she first encountered the centuries-old tradition of Nigerian pottery and began “to think about the anonymous labor of women and also the way African objects and material culture are categorized.”ⁱⁱ Considering Leigh’s engagement with the iconography of diverse African nations, such as cowrie shells and gold leaf, the deep blue ceramic surface of the present work may be an allusion to the exploitative industry of cobalt mining that still plagues the Democratic Republic of the Congo—a very present example of colonialism at play.

 

Embodying the key tenets of Leigh’s groundbreaking approach, Figure (Cobalt) is a meditation on the politics of identity and representation by one of the most exciting artists working in sculpture today. Her revelatory body of work is renowned for its unequivocal portrayal of the fortitude and grandeur of Black women across the diaspora. “I just like the idea of thinking about femininity in a different way,” Leigh expressed, “as something solid, and enduring, rather than always something fragile and weak.”ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Simone Leigh's work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2023.

 

Collectors’ Digest

 

• Leigh’s work has recently been subject to international critical acclaim since her pivotal solo exhibition at the New Museum, New York in 2016. Her first museum survey, Simone Leigh, is now open at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and will travel to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles.

• The artist was awarded the much-coveted Golden Lion for her presentation at the 2022 Venice Biennale—where she made history as the first Black woman to represent the United States.

 

 

ⁱ Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, “Simone Leigh: For Her Own Pleasure and Edification,” The Hugo Boss Prize 2018: Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2019, n.p.

ⁱⁱ Simone Leigh, Nancy Kenney, “Simone Leigh, now in the spotlight, contemplates the theme of invisibility,” The Art Newspaper, April 24, 2019, online.

ⁱⁱⁱ Simone Leigh, quoted in “Simone Leigh never thought the art world would embrace her. Now she feels unstoppable,” CBS News, April 27, 2019, online.