Simone Leigh

Rujeko Hockley: Leigh is interested in forms rooted in the African and African American experience, specifically thinking about experience and cultural traditions.

Narrator: Biennial co-curator Rujeko Hockley.

Rujeko Hockley: Particularly thinking through female subjectivity and Black feminism, questions of labor, beauty, utility, and agency. In the works that you’re seeing in the galleries, which are ceramic sculptures plus two large bronze sculptures, Leigh is drawing on references including West African sculpture and architecture, particularly adobe homes and structures built in that part of the world, world’s fairs of the early part of the twentieth century, specifically a cafe in Mississippi called Mammy’s Cupboard, in which a woman’s skirt encased the structure that people would enter through, with at the top of it a Black woman in a kind of mammy costume. So in an effort to overturn these stereotypical images as well as to overturn this idea of Black women being used in service of other people, Leigh uses this form here in her two sculptures, Corrugated Lady and Stick, creating these large skirts on top of which the figures, the busts of the women sit.