A modern-day Tocqueville, surveying American life from a friendly distance, could easily conclude that we are living in an era of Black ascendancy. This might sound crazy to Black people who cope with oppression and injustice on a daily basis, but in the cultural sphere the prominence that African Americans have held for more than a century in music is increasingly evident across many genres. It is unmistakable in contemporary art, where market-savvy galleries scramble to add Black artists to their rosters, and such major figures as Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, David Hammons, and the late Jean-Michel Basquiat bring record-shattering prices at auction. At the Venice Biennale, the oldest and still the most important international exhibition of recent art, the United States was represented on the last two occasions by an African American artist—Mark Bradford in 2017 and Martin Puryear in 2019. When this year’s Biennale opens, on April 23rd, the artist in the United States pavilion will be Simone Leigh, the first Black woman to be designated for this honor.
In late October, I spent a day with Leigh at the Stratton Sculpture Studio in Philadelphia, where all the bronze works for her Venice show have been fabricated. Bronze is a relatively new material for Leigh, who made her mark as a master of ceramic sculpture. She met me at the front door, and introduced me to Shane and Julia Stratton, who own and operate the studio. Just inside the door was the bottom half of a huge sculpture based on a West African D’mba ritual mask, the kind that rests on the wearer’s shoulders and rises to an imposing height. The finished work will be installed outdoors in Venice, in the forecourt of the U.S. pavilion. Next to it stood a sixteen-foot, semi-abstract female figure whose spoonlike body was encircled by a giant serpent. This one will not be going to Venice. Leigh’s work is in demand worldwide, and the spoon woman was for Prospect New Orleans, a citywide exhibition that would open in January. (Venice will have a similar version, though without the snake.)
“It’s entitled ‘Sentinel (Mami Wata),’ my interpretation of a West African water spirit, a deity who has destructive powers as well as creative-generative ones,” Leigh explained. (A few days later, when there was a flood in the apartment she had rented in Philadelphia, she blamed it on the mami wata.) The Prospect New Orleans curators had wanted to install her sculpture on an empty pedestal in Lee Circle, where a statue of Robert E. Lee had once stood. Leigh had balked at that. “With all the furor about Confederate statues being pulled down, I saw that I was being caught up in a big American problem that I hadn’t planned on addressing,” she told me. “I also realized that a sixty-five-foot pedestal with a sculpture on top of it was absolutely ridiculous.” Her mami wata was installed at the base of the pedestal.
Leigh, who is fifty-four, has the calm, deep-seated confidence of someone who goes her own way. Her physical presence makes her down-to-earth manner seem regal. A tall, handsome woman with long, braided hair, she buys the ankle-length dresses she wears from Casey Casey, a shop in Paris whose owner, Gareth Casey, uses patterns that resemble those of French work dresses from previous centuries. “They’re so well made, and they last forever,” Leigh said. “My style is international auntie.” Leigh didn’t call herself an artist until 2001, when she was a single mother raising her daughter, Zenobia, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, and for years after that she had to struggle with an art world that looked down on ceramics, her chosen medium, as a material for hobbyists or studio potters. Her boundless energy, superb craftsmanship, and expanding vision kept her going, and the breakthrough, when it came, was so decisive that an invitation to represent her country at the Biennale seemed foreordained.
Her bronze sculptures were cast from clay models, which Leigh makes in a large room on the top floor of the Stratton studio, a century-old, three-story building with a rope-operated elevator. Leigh had used eleven thousand pounds of imported French clay to build the figures; after each was cast in bronze, the clay was recycled and used again. Throughout the casting process, Leigh has worked closely with Shane and Julia Stratton and their senior staffer, Pavel Efremoff, and a crew of four assistants, who make ceramic molds for each section of the sculpture, pour in the bronze, weld the parts together, and do the chasing and finishing. “It’s the same process that’s been around for three thousand years,” Julia said. “We’re dinosaurs.” The D’mba piece was so big—twenty-five feet high—that its top grazed the ceiling, so the Strattons had raised the roof and put in a four-sided skylight. The Strattons have worked with other well-known artists, including Matthew Barney and Hans Haacke, but for the past three years Leigh has been their main client. “Our preference for this time in our lives is to be Simone’s backup singers,” Shane told me. “We love her, and we love her work.”
Two nearly finished clay figures were in the big room when I was there, both of them realistic and more than twice life-size: a standing woman, nude and headless (the head would go on later), and a woman bent at the waist, with both arms extended outward. “Women washing clothes in a river became a typical postcard in Jamaica during the late nineteenth century,” Leigh said. Leigh’s parents are Jamaican, and she spent time there when she was a child. “I think there’s a line going through this show that’s about the souvenir—the idea that we like to bring other worlds into our world. The souvenir is a seemingly harmless object that has actually proven to be quite devastating. This one is a very racist image.” The live model for the washerwoman and the standing woman was Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, a writer and teacher who is one of Leigh’s closest friends. “There are very few projects of mine that she hasn’t been involved in,” Leigh said. When Leigh was working on a video for a show she had at the Guggenheim Museum in 2019, she asked Rhodes-Pitts and several other friends to try to remember and assume positions they had been in when they gave birth. “Sharifa was just leaning against the wall, thinking, and that was the start of this sculpture,” Leigh said, referring to the headless woman. (“It was about me being completely into myself,” Rhodes-Pitts recalls.) Even without the head, the figure conveyed for me a sense of inward gazing. I asked Leigh if it was also a portrait—she had told me she never did portraits. She thought, and said, “Yes. I would describe it as a portrait, the first portrait I’ve ever done.”
Across the room, pinned to the wall, was an enlarged photographic image of an African American woman in a floral dress, sitting at a table on which there was a jug with a grotesque human face. Leigh explained that the photograph, taken in 1882, was a parody of Oscar Wilde, who had travelled throughout the United States on a lecture tour that year. His tour had given rise to dozens of newspaper and magazine cartoons and parodies of his flamboyant clothes, effeminate mannerisms, and poetic descriptions of the aesthetic movement in England. Some showed Wilde as a monkey, and in this image a photographer in Aiken, South Carolina, had depicted him as something that, in Aiken, could be considered even more insulting: a Black woman.
“What’s interesting is that this is the first known photograph of a face jug,” Leigh told me. In the U.S., pottery jugs with human faces (often caricatured) originated before the Civil War in the Edgefield District, in South Carolina, where they were made secretly by slaves, for their own amusement, and then openly by freed workers after Emancipation. “We don’t know what they mean, but I think they are in the class of power objects in African art, objects that do things in the world,” Leigh said. “Anyway, I decided to reproduce this entire—tableau, shall we call it?—in ceramic for Venice, a 3-D version of a souvenir portrait that was done to mock Oscar Wilde. The funny thing is that it’s a stunningly beautiful photograph.”
Leigh recently staged a public burning of an eight-foot paper effigy of the Oscar Wilde woman. Two years earlier, she had been to the carnival in Martinique, where the climactic event is the ritual burning of an effigy of the Vaval, the carnival king, who also personifies the bad things that have happened during the past year. Leigh’s burning took place on a stretch of the waterfront near her studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and the effigy stood for racist images in general. In discussing the event with me before it happened, she saw connections to the controversy over pulling down monuments. In 2019, Leigh was invited to participate in a competition for a sculpture to replace the statue, in Central Park, of J. Marion Sims, a doctor who had made advances in gynecology by performing experimental operations on enslaved women. Her design won, but it was not used. Leigh says that she will never again have anything to do with commissioned public monuments. “I feel weird responding to questions of what a monument should be,” she said. “But if I had to offer something it would be this Vaval idea.”
When I talked with Leigh in Philadelphia, she hadn’t made a final decision on the works that will be in her Venice exhibition. She planned to include a number of her new clay pieces, in addition to the bronzes. “I’m still very much someone who works with clay,” she said. She and the Strattons had, in defiance of contemporary trends, returned the practice of clay-modelling for bronze to a handmade process. “Some works being made today are objects that were scanned electronically and then blown up and rendered in marble or whatever, and they often look kind of machined, like something from Disney,” Leigh said. “Shane and Julia suggested that I make mine to scale, in clay. Until I met them, I didn’t know I had that alternative, and it’s made a big difference. What I’m learning, getting better at, is how things look in bronze—things like drapery and clothes and shoes, how they translate.” Leigh is in control of the process from start to finish. She also pays for it. “If your gallery is paying, then they’re the client,” she says. “You’re not the client. I pay for everything myself so I can be free, and that’s better for everyone. That’s the difference between being successful when you’re fifty-four and when you’re twenty-nine. It’s worked very well for me.”
The Church of the Nazarene, founded in 1908 in Pilot Point, Texas, is one of the many evangelical orders that have taken root in American soil. It is also very strong in Jamaica, where Gilbert Obadiah Leigh, Simone’s father, is from. Her mother, Claire, was born in New York but was sent to Jamaica in her early childhood. Both of them became Nazarene missionaries. Gilbert was a preacher, and was assigned to a Nazarene church in New Jersey, and then, a year later, to one in Chicago, and Simone, the youngest of their four children, was born there in 1967. “My father was extremely charismatic, a fire-and-brimstone preacher,” Leigh told me. “He’s ninety-three now, and he was preaching until he was eighty-five.” He was also ambitious. He formed his own corporation, and got grants from the government for his social projects—at one point he ran several day-care centers and a boys’ home. A street on the South Side of Chicago is named for Gilbert Leigh. The two older Leigh children, Stephanie and Steven, embraced the Nazarene faith without question, but the younger ones did not. Whitney, a lawyer, who is fifteen months older than Simone, circumvented the church’s ban on dancing, moviegoing, and other sinful pleasures by not letting his parents know that he engaged in them. “I could get away with things my sister couldn’t because I was a boy,” he told me. “But when we were little I didn’t have the crystalized resistance that Simone had. I didn’t confront our parents the way she did. Simone was always very inquisitive, and always very independent.”
Her independence led to frequent punishments, with a belt or a switch. “I was definitely the most rebellious child in the family,” Simone confirmed. “When I was four or five, my parents told me I was going to die, and my body would wither away and my soul would go somewhere else, and I could not deal with the idea of my body withering away. I cried for a week. I did all the religious things. Before I was seventeen, I went to church more often than most people do in their entire lives. We had vacation Bible school, and Nazarene sleepaway camps, and I even taught Sunday school for a while. But I never became a believer.”
Their family life was far from austere. After a few years of living in the parsonage, Gilbert bought a large house in South Shore, a formerly white neighborhood near the University of Chicago. A few African American families had moved in during the nineteen-sixties, and the whites had taken flight. “I grew up in what could be called a mansion, near a golf course, two blocks from the lake,” Leigh said. Whitney Leigh added, “This was the same kind of neighborhood that Michelle Obama grew up in. There were houses by Frank Lloyd Wright in it. Our house had a walk-in wine cellar in the basement, which we used to store books.” Their mother wanted the children to absorb as much culture as possible. Leigh remembers going to André Watts concerts, and standing in line for five or six hours to see the Tutankhamun exhibit at the Field Museum. “We’d spend weekends at the conservatory, taking music lessons,” she said. “I became a serious piano player, and I also played a lot of tennis. At one point, very briefly, I was a ball girl for the U.S.T.A. For a Black person in the United States, the South Side of Chicago was a wonderful place to grow up.”
In the summer, the family sometimes visited Jamaica. When Simone was twelve, she went to her paternal grandmother’s funeral, and learned that she had a Chinese ancestor, most likely one of the many Asians brought to Jamaica as indentured servants. “My father changed the spelling of our name, from Lee to Leigh, when he immigrated to America,” she said.
The Nazarene Church condemned many aspects of secular life, but Leigh’s parents believed in education. Three of the Leigh children attended Kenwood High, a strong public school in Hyde Park, and all of them excelled. Stephanie and Steven went on to a Nazarene college in rural Illinois. Whitney, who spent high-school summers studying Russian, had pushed his independence too far. In his last year of middle school, he skipped classes for two days to visit a girlfriend, and his parents found out. They took him out of that school, and instead of going to Kenwood he was sent to a Catholic high school, and then to a small Christian college in Michigan. After that, he persuaded his parents to let him go to Stanford Law School. He became a lawyer, founded his own firm in San Francisco, and lived there, far from the family, until this year, when he moved to New York to help Simone care for their aging mother.
Simone’s escape was more traumatic. After graduating from Kenwood, she enrolled at Earlham College, a Quaker school in Richmond, Indiana. She had convinced her parents that it was a Christian college, but, once there, she “just let go of the whole belief system” that she had struggled with since early childhood. Earlham “really saved me,” she said. “Quakers believe that God is in everyone, and they respect people so much. It was ideal for me to be in the Quaker environment at that time.” Her newfound peace was short-lived. During the winter of her sophomore year, her mother learned that Leigh was having a sexual relationship with her first serious boyfriend. “My father hired a private investigator,” she said. “He called my boyfriend’s parents and threatened to bring charges of statutory rape. He said I had to come home, and I didn’t.”
When she did go home, at the end of the spring term, her father gave her an ultimatum: she could go to a Christian college in Chicago and live at home, or she could leave. That night, she woke up and found her mother and her older sister praying over her. Leigh, who was nineteen, packed her things in a green canvas bag and left, and her parents stopped supporting her. “They cut me off,” she said. “I barely talked with them for ten years.”
She returned to Richmond, and took a leave of absence from Earlham. “I worked at the state hospital, as a licensed practical nurse, until I got legal independence from my father and could fill out my own tax returns and get student loans,” she said. After six months, she was able to continue her studies at Earlham, where she followed a full liberal-arts curriculum. She had planned to become a social worker—the school was known for its social-justice department—but two of her teachers, Kate Wininger and Michael Thiedeman, changed her thinking. Wininger taught a course on Women in Philosophy. “That course energized Simone to speak and participate,” Wininger told me. “I thought she was a really powerful person, with a great willingness to listen. Simone was popular, but not with everyone. People who are more reticent don’t like it when you take up space. Thirty years later, I remember how she really stood out.”
Leigh’s interest in philosophy was motivated in no small part by her rejection of the harsh Nazarene morality. “Fundamentalist Christians of the variety that I was associated with don’t really respect other human beings, especially non-Christians,” she told me, in one of our conversations. “They are in the world but not of the world.” Earlham opened up new worlds and different cultures. The school had a department of Japanese studies. Leigh took courses in Japanese history, literature, calligraphy, and painting, and saw many Japanese films. Reading Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” she said to herself, “Oh, wow, that’s happening right here in this college. The Western world eats other cultures—takes from the culture and denigrates it at the same time, and it becomes part of their culture.” Wininger introduced her to the writings of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and other post-structuralist French feminists, and to the second generation of American feminists, who argued for a less militant and more inclusive stance. “A lot of American feminism then was: Become a man,” Wininger said. “Become the rational being that you know you can be. But the Frenchwomen were saying no, men are truncated.” Leigh found all this liberating. She would eventually come to see her own work as being addressed primarily to Black women, who so often found themselves held back not just by white supremacy but by the political and social focus on the Black male.
Michael Thiedeman introduced her to working with clay. Thiedeman was well known in the pottery world. He had studied for two years with an American master potter, Warren MacKenzie, whose teacher had been the great English ceramic artist and scholar Bernard Leach. Thiedeman had a deep knowledge of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean pottery; he liked to say that he was essentially “a refugee from a different century.” Leigh had taken a ceramics class in high school, but it hadn’t caught her interest. In Thiedeman’s beginners’ class, the attraction was immediate. She had no interest in learning how to use the potter’s wheel. “I was working with her on a simple coil pot, and bang! It took,” Thiedeman told me. “From then on, my work was Simone. Simone was a blessing. She was so full of life, full of spirit, full of humor. She discovered who she was and where she was headed—she was always going to make sculptures, not utilitarian vessels. I encouraged her to apply for a summer internship at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. She got it, and for two months she was surrounded by African vessels—great, voluminous forms, which I think were crucial to her development.” (Leigh also read Sylvia Leith-Ross’s book “Nigerian Pottery,” which made a deep impression.) “She was a wonderful student, and a truly remarkable human being,” Thiedeman said. Oddly, Leigh never thought about becoming an artist. “I didn’t want to be poor,” she explained. “And it didn’t seem like art could bring me stability or a family or any of the things I wanted.” But she continued to work with clay and with Thiedeman. “I became an art major so I could have a studio,” she said.
Leigh graduated from Earlham in 1990 and moved to New York, where she lived at first with a friend in Harlem, and got a job at a ceramics-supply store in Greenwich Village. The store had a studio in the basement, and in the evenings she was able to continue working on the large terra-cotta water pots that she had been making at Earlham. “For ten years, I was obsessed with these water pots,” she told me. “It was a kind of perfect form, and it was something women had been making all over the world for centuries, this anonymous labor of women.” She loved working with clay—the warm feel of it, and the excitement of the firings. By this time, Leigh had read “A Potter’s Book,” “The Unknown Craftsman,” and other classic texts on ceramics, and she knew that pottery could be a way of life. “Things weren’t working out in New York, though,” she said. “I didn’t get a great internship, or into a graduate school.”
In 1992, she went to live in a yurt near Charlottesville, Virginia, where a group of white bohemians had established a commune. “There were people who described themselves as Sufis, and people who taught the Japanese tea ceremony, and others who were living out all kinds of utopian fantasies,” she recalled. There was also a group of would-be ceramic artists, who fired their work in a Japanese-style anagama kiln. It was her first experience with American studio pottery, an informal brotherhood of amateur and professional craftspeople who worked outside the commercial marketplace. “I’d thought I just wanted to live in the woods and make objects,” Leigh said. “But I had entered an environment with a lot of bitter and angry people, people who had expected to eke out a nice living, and it didn’t happen. The others were all making functional pottery. I really enjoy and appreciate the craftsmanship of many American studio potters, but I think it’s a sort of failed utopia. Quakerism is another. I guess the biggest failed utopia right now would be America. At any rate, I’ve never been interested in purely functional pots. I’ve never made one mug. The water pot that I would spend an entire week building made no sense in that context. And I didn’t realize how much I would miss the city, and how alienating it would be to live in the country. I learned that I can’t exist outside a Black community.”
Leigh went back to New York in 1993. She shared an apartment in Williamsburg with a professional photographer named Yuri Marder, whom she didn’t know, and supported herself with a succession of temporary jobs. Estranged from everyone in her family except her brother Whitney, she said, “I was poor all the time. There were periods when I didn’t have any money at all.” For several months, she made and fired yellow, green, and blue stoneware tiles for two Brooklyn subway stations, Prospect Park and Parkside, which were being renovated, and she taught art to very young children. Somehow she managed to find studio spaces where she used her free time to work with clay. “It’s strange, because I had a kind of confidence that I was making important work,” she told me. Now and then, someone would buy one of her big water-pot sculptures, but she was pretty sure the pottery world would never accept her work, and several people had assured her that, in the art world, ceramic sculpture was not considered art. Eventually, she thought, she would save enough money to move to San Francisco, where Whitney lived. “But then I married my roommate in Williamsburg,” she said, and burst out laughing.
Marder, four years older than Leigh, was the son of an Austrian refugee from Hitler who had become an English professor, and an American-born opera singer whose parents were from Poland. He and Simone were married in 1994, at the Marders’ summer house on Monhegan Island, in Maine. Leigh’s sister Stephanie and her brother Whitney came to the wedding, and so did her father. Simone hadn’t seen him for years, and he had not been invited. He came alone. Gilbert and Claire were separated by then—they never divorced, but Claire had left the house in Chicago and moved to Harlem. Gilbert made a good impression. “I was really amazed that he came, and after that we started having a relationship again,” Simone said. It was not a reconciliation. They rarely see each other. She has become closer to her mother, who lives in a house in Brooklyn that Leigh bought for her, two blocks from her own. Both of her parents are ill, and I was unable to interview them for this Profile.
Zenobia was born in 1996, and for the next five years Leigh was a full-time mother. She stopped going to her studio. This self-imposed hiatus may have put a strain on the marriage, and it ended when the marriage ended, in 2001. Simone and Zenobia had to leave the Brooklyn brownstone where they had been living, and they moved into a two-thousand-square-foot loft in Crown Heights, near the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It was a beautiful, open space, with skylights and plenty of room to work. “She behaved as though we had money before we had money,” Zenobia, who is a graduate student at U.C.L.A., recalled. Leigh poured her energy into making clay objects in a variety of mostly abstract shapes. “I started creating materials for sculptures—for example, the thousands of small rosettes that I’d later use to build larger objects,” she said. “I also began using chicken wire and metal armatures to hold things together, and hanging pieces from the ceiling.” When she had enough work to fill a kiln, she would pile it into her vintage Volvo station wagon and take it to be fired at one of various kilns around the city.
Her friend A. O. Scott, a freelance journalist at the time and now a film reviewer for the Times, described some of her new work as “large vessels in sort of breast forms.” Scott and Leigh had met a few years earlier, pushing their babies’ prams in Prospect Park; his son, Ezra, and Zenobia were the same age, and they are still close. Scott was struck by Leigh’s self-confidence. “I really felt she was doing something that could turn out to be major,” he told me. Leigh was coming into her own then as a social energizer. Remembering the gatherings in her loft, Scott said, “There would be maybe a dozen people, kids and grownups, artist friends of hers like Wangechi Mutu, but also her own mother, and the director of the nursery school where Zenobia had gone. She was a magnet for remarkably interesting academics, filmmakers, radical feminists. Simone can be a bit overwhelming—calling you at six-thirty in the morning to talk at length—but that’s the flip side of her greatness.”
Zenobia’s master’s degree at U.C.L.A. is in sculpture. “I wasn’t overjoyed when I realized that she was going to be an artist, but there it is,” Leigh told me. Zenobia had seen how difficult an artist’s life could be: “I watched my mom struggle for a long time when her work wasn’t being recognized. As a young child, I didn’t understand why she was so exhausted and physically unavailable to me. She was working a full-time job, taking me back and forth to school, doing residencies, and trying to have a studio practice.” The full-time job was teaching art at Studio in a School and other early-childhood programs in the city. “I loved, loved, loved teaching art to children,” Leigh told me. “They’re wonderful artists, and they don’t need outside approval.” She had also discovered “the divorced woman’s dirty secret”—built-in child care. Zenobia spent weekends and summers with her father, and that meant hours of uninterrupted work time.
Leigh had finally realized that she was an artist. She had her first show in 2001, at the Rush Arts Gallery, on West Twenty-sixth Street, where Derrick Adams was the curatorial director. It opened in September, shortly after 9/11, and Leigh will tell you that no one ever came, but a few people did. One of them was the collector A. C. Hudgins. He didn’t buy anything, but he remembers seeing a hanging, chandelier-like clay sculpture. What struck him about Leigh’s work was the presence of her hand in it. “She wasn’t just taking some image and popping it into the computer,” he told me. “It’s all about the hand.” Hudgins became a mentor and one of Leigh’s most important supporters over the years, along with Peggy Cooper Cafritz, the Washington collector and civil-rights activist, and the artist and writer Lorraine O’Grady. “Simone has nerves of steel,” O’Grady told me. “She understood the situation of the culture and where it was headed before the culture itself knew.”
Leigh’s sculptures were in a solo show at Momenta Art, in Brooklyn, in 2004, and she was featured in several group exhibitions. She also began to get residencies—invitations to work in community spaces such as the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Henry Street Settlement, where her work was seen by other artists and museum curators. In the summers, when Zenobia went to Monhegan Island with her father, Leigh travelled abroad. “That was a really big thing,” she told me. “I went to South Africa and Nigeria in 2007, for three weeks. Each year after that, I’d go to a different country.” In Namibia, she learned from descendants of the Herero people about the genocide that took place between 1904 and 1907, when the German colonial government responded to an uprising by starving thousands of people to death. Bisi Silva, a Nigerian-born curator who had returned from Europe to start a contemporary-art space in Lagos, became another of Leigh’s mentors; she introduced her to many African curators and artists. “So I started having a different art career outside of the U.S.,” Leigh said. At home, though, recognition still seemed far off and uncertain.
This began to change in 2010, when Leigh received a coveted residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. It included an exhibition there, and Leigh’s show impressed a number of art-world insiders. Derrick Adams included her in a group show that he was curating at the Jack Tilton Gallery, on East Seventy-sixth Street. Tilton and Leigh took an instant liking to each other. She joined his gallery, and had two very well-received shows there. For the first time, she was able to stop teaching and live on sales of her work. Leigh and Tilton went to jazz concerts and museums together, and had long, philosophical discussions about art. “He really understood how to work with artists—something he said he had learned from Betty Parsons,” she told me. (Tilton had worked for the Betty Parsons Gallery, and Parsons had put him in charge of the gallery when she retired.) “I don’t know how to explain it,” Leigh added. “Jack was the kind of white person who doesn’t change when Black people come into the room.”
In 2012, a show at the Kitchen, a nonprofit alternative-art space in Chelsea, featured three large, hanging sculptures. Hudgins, making up for his earlier failure to buy a work, acquired a Leigh sculpture that was in the shape of a watermelon and covered in blue rosettes. Also on view was Leigh’s first video, a five-minute, futuristic study of Uhura, the only Black character in the main cast of the original “Star Trek” series, which Leigh had watched as a child. (Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts was Uhura.) Leigh had always resisted working in any form except clay, but she enjoyed the collaborations with other people which video required. Encouraged by Rashida Bumbray, who had curated her show at the Kitchen, Leigh branched out into social practice, in 2014, with the “Free People’s Medical Clinic,” sponsored by the public-arts institution Creative Time, which turned the Stuyvesant Mansion, in Brooklyn, into a medical center offering free H.I.V. tests, health screenings, yoga lessons, and other benefits. (It was modelled on the Black Panthers’ community actions.) In 2016, at the New Museum, she organized “The Waiting Room,” another social initiative with guides to physical and spiritual health. “Even though many critics and artists think ‘The Waiting Room’ is my most important work, I see it as one of my failed projects,” Leigh told me. “It didn’t feel like it was my work. I’m uncomfortable calling something my work that’s out of my control. After that, I was really stubborn about doing anything besides making sculpture.”
Two other shows in 2016, at the Tate Exchange in London and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, introduced her ceramic sculpture to a wider audience. Tilton had arranged for her to show at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, for which she made six small busts of imaginary women, with multicolored ceramic rosettes for hair; all of them sold at the preview. “There was something about them that stopped people in their tracks,” Lauren Hudgins Shuman, A. C. Hudgins’s daughter, recalled. Shuman worked for Jack Tilton, and to her the show was clearly “a turning point in terms of recognition.” It was also Leigh’s last show with Tilton. His gallery lacked the resources to handle Leigh’s expanding career as a major artist, and Tilton was not well. After the Armory show closed, Leigh decided, with great reluctance, to leave the Tilton Gallery and move to Luhring Augustine, a larger gallery with a strong roster of artists. Breaking the news to Tilton, she said, was agonizing.
“Simone is never comfortable, and so her work never stops expanding and growing,” Rashida Bumbray told me recently. (Bumbray is now the director of culture and art at the Open Society Foundations.) It would have been unthinkable for Leigh to repeat herself with more of the ceramic busts that had been such a success at the Park Avenue Armory. In 2018, she won the Hugo Boss Prize, and the following year she appeared in her first Whitney Biennial. She also began doing full-length sculptures of Black women. The figures are bare-breasted and seven or eight feet tall, and they wear voluminous hoop skirts made of raffia. A few of them have generic facial features; in others the eyes are missing, or the face is blank. One has what looks like a floral wreath where her face should be. (“I toggle back and forth between abstraction and figuration,” Leigh told an interviewer.) “Only in retrospect did I see that this was a natural evolution of form, from the water pot to the full figure,” Leigh told me.
In the spring of 2019, a sixteen-foot bronze bust of a Black woman appeared on the High Line in New York. Mounted on a plinth, it was clearly visible to pedestrians and people in cars and taxis on Tenth Avenue, and its power caught and held their attention. Her hair was done in long braids, and her torso had an architectural dimension, which echoed the traditional building styles of the Mousgoum people of Cameroon. (Two years earlier, Leigh had been similarly inspired by dome-shaped, mud-and-raffia kitchen houses, called imbas, from Zimbabwe; she had built three of these structures for a show at Marcus Garvey Park, in Harlem.) Her monumental High Line sculpture was figurative and abstract, a mysterious and majestic goddess of Black womanhood.
Cecilia Alemani, the High Line’s curator of art projects, had commissioned the piece in 2016. “I was very impressed by her work at the Kitchen show,” Alemani told me. “It was definitely something unexpected compared to what was going on at the time, and I could see that with the right support she could push her practice to another level.” The High Line gave Leigh a quarter of a million dollars to make the sculpture, and Alemani and her team introduced her to the Strattons. It was Leigh’s first bronze sculpture. She made the full-scale clay model in the Stratton studio, and rented an apartment in Philadelphia so that she could be there for the casting, which took seven months. “Somehow my thirty years of working with clay had made me really good at clay modelling for bronze,” she said. “I had no idea I would be so comfortable working at that scale.”
“Brick House,” the sculpture’s title, came from a documentary film Leigh had seen about St. Louis, a city made largely of brick, but it also referred to an expression in Black culture. “If I called someone a brick house, any Black person would know what I was talking about,” she explained. “It’s a woman who’s—I hesitate to use the word ‘strong,’ because of the stereotypes of Black women as towers of strength. It’s about the idea of an ideal woman, but very different from the Western ideal woman, who is fragile. Unfortunately, I think people just related it to the song ‘Brick House,’ which was released by the Commodores in the nineteen-seventies.” (“Ow, she’s a brick house / She’s mighty-mighty, just lettin’ it all hang out.”) Leigh now wishes she had called it something else, even just “Untitled.” But nothing could lessen the sculpture’s impact as a work of public art. “The Strattons said something I thought was really significant,” Leigh added. “They said that ‘Brick House’ was the first time in their career they had made a work that wasn’t making fun of something else. It’s not ironic, it’s straightforward.”
Leigh authorized three other castings of “Brick House.” She owns one, and Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman, influential New York collectors, bought the two others—they kept the first and donated the second to the University of Pennsylvania, their alma mater, where it stands on ground level outside the arts building. Leigh took me there when I was in Philadelphia, so that I could see, as she put it, “how different it is when you can relate it to your own body, without the plinth.” Cecilia Alemani is directing this year’s Venice Biennale. She has arranged for “Brick House” to travel by boat to Venice, where it will occupy a prominent spot in her big international exhibition.
Leigh and I met again in July, at her waterfront studio in Red Hook. The studio is on the ground floor of a warehouse building that overlooks a large section of New York Harbor, including the Statue of Liberty. Leigh had moved into it a few months earlier, after a yearlong, million-dollar renovation that included a complex ventilation system for three kilns. Leigh, wearing a bright-orange, ankle-length dress and white clogs, showed me around. “This is the big deal,” she said, standing in front of a six-foot-high salt-and-soda kiln. “It’s an atmospheric kiln—the closest that ceramics come to true alchemy. At the height of the firing, around two thousand and three hundred degrees, you introduce salt, which is dispersed throughout the atmosphere of the kiln and combines with the silica in the clay to create a unique kind of glaze. You change the object by changing the atmosphere. The results are often not what you’d expect. After thirty years, I still don’t know exactly what’s coming out of the kiln, and I love that. I lose between twenty-five and fifty per cent of what I build—things that don’t make it through the firing.” Two smaller kilns, one of which is about to be replaced by a state-of-the-art Blaauw model, from the Netherlands, occupy separate spaces in the studio. “We can experiment with temperatures and glazes. It’s just endless play.”
In the main workroom, a large, rectangular space with glass doors that lead to a promenade on the water, a studio assistant—one of six—was working on the raffia skirt of an eyeless woman. Five other female figures, finished or nearly finished, each one different, took up the rest of the space. All of them were leaving in a few days for Zurich, where Leigh’s first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, her new gallery, would open in September. Leigh had left Luhring Augustine in 2020. The gallery had done very well with her work, raising her prices significantly, getting her sculptures into museum collections, and connecting her with the David Kordansky gallery in Los Angeles, but Leigh had found that she disliked the complications of working with more than one dealer. Invitations to show her work were coming from a wide range of museums and galleries, and she had decided that she would be better off with one of the big international galleries like Hauser & Wirth, which has branches in all the major art centers and would assign one person to represent her.
The large sculptures in her Zurich show were priced at seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and they all sold in the first week. By then, though, Leigh had decided to leave Hauser & Wirth. “It’s just not appropriate for me,” she said. “It wasn’t a good fit.” Her second gallery change in less than two years drew notice inside and outside the art world. The story broke in ArtNews on October 29th, with statements of mutual love and respect from Leigh and from Hauser & Wirth, and the news was widely reported. In an Instagram post (now deleted) that went viral, a clip from the 2004 German film “Downfall,” about Hitler’s final days, which has been parodied repeatedly in recent years, was adapted to depict Iwan Wirth, the gallery’s co-founder, as the Führer, screaming imprecations at his cowed staff. (“We look like goddam idiots! . . . And don’t fucking tell me she went to Pace!”) Leigh weathered the brouhaha, with irritation and some amusement. A month later, after receiving offers from many top galleries, she joined Matthew Marks, whose roster includes Robert Gober, Jasper Johns, Vija Celmins, Katharina Fritsch, Martin Puryear, and Charles Ray. “I feel honored to be in that gallery,” she told me, sounding not a bit demure.
Leigh’s exhibition at the Venice Biennale was commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Jill Medvedow, the institution’s director, and Eva Respini, its chief curator, had conceived the show in 2019, as a mid-career retrospective, and it will be re-created as such, with additions and a catalogue (the first major one on her work), in 2023. For Venice, Leigh hired her own project manager, Susan Thompson, who speaks Italian fluently, and her own architect, Pierpaolo Martiradonna, who designed her Red Hook studio. Martiradonna reinforced the gallery floors so that they can support the large bronze sculptures, and carried out Leigh’s request to give the somewhat prissy, faux-classical U.S. pavilion a thatched roof. (The costs were largely offset by major grants from the Mellon and Ford Foundations.) Leigh subsidized the making, with Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, of a poetic film about the ethnographic portrayal of ceramic work, which will be on view in one of the galleries. This was in keeping with what Zenobia describes as her mother’s “Act like you’ve got it until you get it” approach to life.
Leigh, who admits to being “a little bit of a conference whore,” and her friend Rashida Bumbray are currently organizing a meeting of Black women artists, writers, and academics, called “Loophole of Retreat,” which will take place at the Biennale from October 8th to the 11th. It is a continuation of a gathering, with the same title, at the Guggenheim in 2019, the year Leigh had her show there. The title refers to an 1861 memoir called “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” by Harriet Jacobs, who spent seven years in a crawl space in her grandmother’s attic (the “loophole of retreat”), hiding from her brutish owner. Leigh recruited the scholars Saidiya Hartman and Tina Campt, both of whom she met at the Berlin Biennale in 2018, as curatorial advisers. “It will be an intellectual free-for-all,” Leigh said, “part two of an ongoing project to create a place for Black women intellectuals. Saidiya said that the academy does not believe there is such a thing as a Black woman intellectual, and that struck me.” Naomi Beckwith, the deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum, talked to me recently about Leigh’s unwavering focus on womanhood. “I think Simone is through and through a feminist,” she said. “In form, in material, in subject, in objects, and even in her literary inspirations, she’s always coming back to some kind of conceptual language around womanhood, and what that does in the framework of an American art history.”
Unable to travel to Venice until recently, because of the pandemic, Leigh is looking forward to spending time there this spring. “I’m going to have my own water taxi,” she said, laughing. For the past five years, Leigh told me, she has been running to catch up with her career. We were talking on Zoom last month, and she was in a reflective mood. “I feel like I’m moving into a different phase of my life,” she said. “I’m going to slow things down. I could have twenty people working for me and make three times as much work as I make now, but there’s no way I could supervise or have my hand in everything, or have relationships with all those people.”
Her success still surprises her. She now lives in a brownstone in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, a house that is not unlike the one she grew up in. (“I don’t think it would be incorrect to call it a mansion.”) Recently, she acquired a goldendoodle named Margot, whom she adores. I asked her if she ever thought about getting married again. Leigh said no, then reconsidered. “I’m just getting to think about it, now that my daughter is in college and out of the house,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of lovers, but no serious partner.” And then, her confidence resurgent: “I probably will find someone soon.”
When I first met her, Leigh had said, “It looks like I may not suffer the fate of most of my forebears, who have ten years of success and then they’re forgotten.” After a pause, she added, “Maybe that’s not going to happen to me. I feel like I’m in my prime, so far as work is concerned. I’ve had thirty years to make a ton of mistakes. Now I feel ready, and for some reason I’m not intimidated.” ♦
