In 2022, Simone Leigh presented a solo show at the Venice Biennale called Sovereignty, becoming the first Black woman to represent the United States in the prestigious international art event. Leigh’s work, characterized by her use of bronze and ceramic to give shape to Black women’s beauty, labor, and thought, is now on display at a show copresented by California African American Museum (CAAM) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) until January 2025. Titled Simone Leigh, the show is a rare opportunity for Californians to see Leigh’s remarkable sculptures that bring a physicality to the contributions of Black women, which have so often been rendered invisible.
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A comprehensive survey of Leigh’s rich and layered oeuvre, the joint show is the most expansive exhibition of the Chicago-born artist on the West Coast to date, featuring dozens of works from throughout her career, including those from the Venice Biennale. Many of Leigh’s more cinematic works are on view at CAAM, which finally reopened in late May after a long closure in the wake of a 2023 storm.
It feels fitting that the reopening features Leigh’s work, since CAAM’s mission is to celebrate the contributions of African Americans to the cultural and political development of this country—which, more or less, could also describe Leigh’s art.
Leigh consistently looks across time to excavate and reimagine the archives of African and diasporic histories that have been distorted and fragmented. “In order to tell the truth,” she says in her first monograph, “you need to invent what might be missing from the archive, to collapse time, to concern yourself with issues of scale, to formally move things around in a way that reveals something more true than fact.”
There’s a delicate balance to Leigh’s work, bringing forward what has often remained in the dark, yet refusing to allow her subjects to be blinded by the light. One video, created with artist Chitra Ganesh, titled my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell (the title comes from a poem of the same name by Gwendolyn Brooks), features a nude Black woman lying on a marble slab, her head covered in a pile of gravel. The figure is perfectly still, but a close viewer will notice a shallow breath gently stretching her skin as she inhales and exhales. With the subject’s recumbent position, the piece reimagines the European iconography of reclining female nudes, but here, it is brought forth from Leigh’s and Ganesh’s perspectives as queer women of color. It raises the question, What do we give—and what is taken—as we search for the quiet of peace?
Also on display are Leigh’s lesser-known chandelier pieces, such as Trophallaxis, which hangs from the ceiling with breast-like forms cast from watermelons. Each piece in the chandelier is unique, some with scars, some with antennae protruding from their fruit, some with gold-plated areolae, signifiers of the complexities of women’s bodies in both the life they sustain and the violence often thrust upon them. (The name trophallaxis is the scientific term for how insects feed their larvae through regurgitating.)
Martinique, on view at LACMA, is a piece with the power to stop you in your tracks. A large-scale sculpture with a cobalt-blue glaze, it’s named for the Caribbean island colonized by the French in 1635, where, for centuries, enslaved inhabitants developed sugar and rum. This legacy resulted in the sexualization of the Martinican women, portrayed as docile and exotic. The sculpture stands defiant of this: she is tall, her shoulders broad, her hips wide enough to place a protective barrier around her, her breasts cupped lightly in the palms of her hands, as decidedly that they are all her own. Headless, the piece references the decapitated statue of Joséphine Bonaparte (wife of Napoleon) that stood in Martinique for over a century before it was taken down by activists in 2020. Joséphine, who grew up on the island and whose family owned a plantation, is best known for her possible role in Napoleon’s reinstatement of slavery there.
Reading through the exhibition’s accompanying monograph, I was taken by a quote from the organizing curator, Eva Respini, who wrote, “As is the case with any retrospective of a living artist, this is an incomplete story. So far, the media narrative around Leigh’s career has often been linked to belatedness—the notion that this moment is overdue. But perhaps it is the institutions, press, and collectors who are belated. The work has always been there, and its impact and power can no longer be denied. Her art teaches us that time cannot be forced.”
Time, at its center, is a construct. And we all have the ability to pull from the past and mold the future. It is Leigh who does it the very best…with the help of a little clay.•
Shaquille Heath is a writer and essayist who explores the intricacies of Blackness and identity, specifically in the visual arts. Her work has appeared in Juxtapoz, the New York Times, The Cut, the San Francisco Chronicle, Elephant, and elsewhere.
