Simone Leigh

Recently representing the United States in the 2022 Venice Biennale, Simone Leigh is a pioneer of contemporary sculpture. For over two decades, Leigh has embraced a polyphonic artistic vocabulary that elaborates on Black feminist thought, an intellectual tradition which values and centers the experiences of Black women. Informed by a rigorous attention to a wide swath of historical periods, geographies, and artistic traditions of Africa and the African diaspora, Leigh often combines the female body with domestic vessels or architectural elements to point to unacknowledged acts of labor and care, particularly among and for Black women. Often combining premodern techniques and materials—including lost-wax casting, salt-fired ceramics, and terracotta—with potent cultural iconographies such as cowrie shells, plantains, and tobacco leaves, Leigh creates objects and environments that reframe stereotypes associated with black women and celebrate black life.

Leigh was born in Chicago in 1967 and first began exhibiting her work in the early-2000s. In addition to her Venice Biennale presentation, Leigh has had prestigious solo museum exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Tate Gallery, London; Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, among others. She is the recipient of the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize and 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Leigh is the current subject of a major retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, traveling to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and California African American Museum (CAAM) in Los Angeles through 2025 with an accompanying monograph.