LOS ANGELES — Simultaneous exhibitions of an individual artist’s work can be hard to pull off successfully. The shows’ conceits might contradict one another, or differing curatorial visions can cloud the artist’s actual intent. Simone Leigh, a traveling exhibition on view concurrently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the California African American Museum (CAAM), makes it work.
The comprehensive and thought-provoking exhibition spans nearly 20 years and includes work from Leigh’s 2022 Venice Biennale presentation. Its synchronized presence in two distinct institutions — one that honors the Black American story and one, located near glitzy Beverly Hills, that presents top-tier contemporary art to Los Angeles — brings into focus the notions that Leigh’s work purposefully butts up against. By presenting a cohesive exhibition split into two differently coded locations, it demonstrates the futility and ignorance in prescribing a definitive role to the Black feminine in a postcolonial world. Yes, this is Black art. Yes, it is focused on the Black femme. Yes, it delves into the roots of a far-flung diaspora. Yes, it is distinctly American. And yes, it is for you, even if you are none of those things.
Leigh’s work interrogates critical components of sculpture through her signature use of clay as a medium that highlights the forging of form. By exaggerating or dulling specific aspects of familiar figures, she draws attention to the fact that it is a creation — not a truth. In one work at CAAM (“Jug,” 2022), molds made from watermelons are used to create stoneware cowrie shells. Cowrie shells were a highly valued currency across the African continent, while watermelon has long been weaponized to degrade the stolen Africans who were enslaved in the US. In “Jug,” Leigh transforms ridicule to riches, and bridges a chasm between American Black and African Black values.
Her work also prods at the relationship between architecture and people. Is architecture designed to bring out our imagination or to contain us? When we present ourselves or envision others, we create a scaffolding for perception. But are we doing so in a way that is supportive or caging? Her sculptures of Black women are sturdy and stoic, and larger than life — bodies as encasings, the Black feminine as a load-bearing pillar. “Sharifa” (2022), a bronze sculpture nearly 10 feet tall and 3 feet in diameter, stands high above viewers with a modestly bowed head. It appears as if nothing but heavy machinery or a natural phenomenon could topple it. Yet many of Leigh’s works, including “Sharifa,” are based on real people — other artists — with feelings, goals, and hardships. It recalls a line from When Rain Clouds Gather, the first novel by renowned South African writer Bessie Head: “They were afflicted by the same ailment — loneliness. But if a grown woman cried, all those hot tears might melt the iron rod that was her backbone.”
The solidity of her sculpted Black women — physically weighty and imposing in scale, iron rods and backbone — aggrandizes but does not sexualize them. Their curves are not lewd, but rather geometric, foundational, protective, strong, and often purposeful; this is Leigh’s architecture at work. They’re beautiful and present and taking up space, but they do not belong to the viewer. In fact, their sense of privacy and unknowability awakens a level of envy in me. Take “Bisi” (2022), a looming armless bust and mannequin-like head whose lower half resembles the hideaway skirt of the Nutcracker’s Sugar Plum Fairy. Facial characteristics do not betray her anonymity, allowing her story to remain her own. Most of Leigh’s sculptures have vague features that, to me, eradicate the importance of viewers’ perceptions of them. All of Leigh’s figurative sculptures seem to belong primarily to themselves (even if one could seek refuge inside her bell form), as they challenge viewers to question whether they can say the same.
“Conspiracy” (2022) at LACMA, one of three video works in the show (the other two are at CAAM), projects footage of Leigh and her assistants peppered by conceptions of entombment, death, archeological digs, and anthropological studies. Scenes of clay working are juxtaposed with images of mummification and unboxing of artifacts and rituals filmed on remote-looking islands. “Breakdown” (2011), a collaboration with artists Liz Magic Laser and Alicia Hall Moran, could represent the interior monologue of the artists in “Conspiracy”; the video shows a Black woman in an ornate theater singing in operatic runs — a Western art — and decrying how she must constantly perform in order to feel accepted. The other CAAM video work (“my dreams, my works must wait till after hell,” 2011), a collaboration between Leigh and Chitra Ganesh under the name of “Girl,” is so subtle that it could be mistaken for a still. A Black woman lays on her side and faces away from the viewer, her head disappearing in a pile of rocks. The only evidence of movement are the tiny ripples her skin makes from silent but seemingly labored breath. It’s a tormented sort of peace. This sentiment ties all three video installations together, and perhaps summarizes some of Leigh’s own artistic journey. It mimics the anxiety and distress that artists experience when creating something unique that will inevitably be judged, that will be excavated by strangers to see if it fits within their parameters of “good.”
Both sites feature an outdoor sculpture, enabling passersby to engage with Leigh’s art. I find something poetic about this arrangement. Within the walls are works of historical commentary, impressive in scope and weight. Outside rests a single work, free to breathe the air amid the architecture of nature, its solitude transforming it from sculpture to monument.
Simone Leigh continues at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles) and California African American Museum (600 State Drive, Exposition Park, Los Angeles) through January 20, 2025. The exhibition was organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston and co-presented in Los Angeles by Taylor Renee Aldridge (CAAM), Naima Keith (LACMA), and Rita Gonzales (LACMA).
