Simone Leigh, in the World

Simone Leigh was on the phone from Venice, Italy. It’s not all here yet, she said.

She had been installing her exhibition of bronzes and ceramics in the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale — one of the most prestigious commissions in the art world, and the first time it has been awarded to a Black female artist. This edition of the Biennale had been delayed a year by COVID-19, and, Leigh reported, it has not been spared disruptions: “Satellite,” a 24-foot bronze female form with a concave disc for a head, destined for the forecourt of the pavilion, was in transit, not certain to arrive in time for next week’s opening.

But Leigh was unperturbed. The piece de resistance exceeded her hopes. She was giving the building a makeover: A neo-Palladian structure with white columns that waves to Jeffersonian architecture, it has gone African, with a thatched roof that drapes partway down the facade, supported by a discreet metal armature and wooden poles.

Seeing the work of her architect Pierpaolo Martiradonna and his team, what struck Leigh was the rich fullness: the shagginess of the thatch, the forest effect of the wood poles. She was into it. “It has an over-the-top Blackness that I really like,” she said.

The concept was “1930s African palace,” she said — a notion that takes aim at the Colonial Exposition held in Paris in 1931, in which France and other powers showed off their territories, featuring replicas — or amalgams — of local architecture and sometimes “natives” brought in to inhabit them.

Beyond this, Leigh is making a pointed connection to the shared history of global exhibitions that includes the Biennale itself, with its classic national pavilions from the interwar years. In the heyday of modernism, nations saw no contradiction between flaunting the colonial “civilizing mission” and their high-art achievements.

In Venice, Leigh confronts these parallel histories by turning the building itself into a sculpture, said Eva Respini, chief curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, which is presenting the pavilion show. “She’s taken these two ideals and enmeshed them to create something entirely her own.”

Leigh, 54, is hovering near art celebrity status. She won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2018, took part in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and even prompted a market kerfuffle last year when she left megagallery Hauser & Wirth 21 months after joining, landing at the smaller Matthew Marks Gallery.

She had a memorable and widely seen success in “Brick House,” her bronze sculpture on the High Line in New York. For two years, until May 2021, the 16-foot-tall bust of a Black woman with a rounded torso and cowrie-tipped braids presided impassively above the traffic — without eyes, thus with no gaze to meet, as if withholding private thoughts.

A counterpoint to the skyscrapers of the city’s Far West Side, it was a triumph of sculpture and urban design. “Brick House” will also be seen at the Biennale’s international exhibition, where work by 213 artists — the vast majority women — will be shown in two vast spaces, the Arsenale and the Giardini, from April 23 through Nov. 27th.

The pavilion commission — which is awarded by the State Department, and will lead into Leigh’s first museum survey, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, in 2023 — represents the culmination of a journey to scale. “I never thought I would be able to work literally with architecture,” she told me at her home in New York’s Brooklyn borough. “Most artists don’t get this opportunity to see their ideas writ large in this way.”

It is also a chance to share her inspirations — from her study of philosophy and ethnography to the history of Black and African art and objects — in ways that no single sculpture can convey. These interests stoke a core concern of her art practice: Black female subjectivity — the sense of self of Black women in the world, their histories, their work, their inner lives.

“The less ‘important’ objects in African art are ones that enter the domestic sphere and are changed by daily or ritual use, by care and love,” Leigh said. “They bring me back into the realm of women’s labor.”

Rashida Bumbray, who curated Leigh’s 2012 breakthrough exhibition at The Kitchen, in New York’s Manhattan borough, and is organizing with her an international convening of Black female artists and scholars in Venice in October, said that the Biennale would assemble the ideas and methods Leigh has honed for decades “in one place — this time to the nth power.” And the promise of the Biennale, with its international audience, is propelling Leigh out into the world.

Seeing Beauty in the ‘Horrifying’

Leigh was living in a yurt in rural Virginia in 1992 when a book fell into her hands that would shape her thinking straight through to Venice: a 64-page souvenir photo book from the 1931 Paris colonial fair.

The Paris fair was one of the last of its kind before World War II scrambled the geopolitical order. It was sprawling, with new modernist halls and replicas of structures like the Angkor Wat temple. The U.S. Pavilion copied George Washington’s Mount Vernon, with cottages for the colonies: Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, Alaska, Hawaii, the Virgin Islands.

Other buildings mixed ethnographic detail with wild conflations. The separate territories of Cameroon and Togo were given a joint pavilion whose architects drew on Cameroon’s Bamoun-Bamileke cultures for a wood structure with a tall thatched dome.

The whole enterprise has attracted scholarly studies, including books by architectural historian Patricia A. Morton in 2000 and art historian Steven Nelson in 2007. But in the yurt, Leigh was struck by what the images demonstrated: how colonial depictions could elevate cultures while generating new ways to dismiss them.

Her background had primed her to appreciate these ambiguities. Growing up in Chicago, a daughter of middle-class Jamaican immigrants, she was used to toggling daily among worlds — West Indian, African American, white.

During visits to Jamaica she grasped how colonialism and resistance, rather than contradictory, produced complex, continually renewing, social values and aesthetics. “I think like someone from the Caribbean,” she said. “I like how complicated it is, seeing beauty in something that was horrifying at the same time.”Her father was a Nazarene pastor, and home life in Chicago followed “extreme” strictures, she said, but she attended public schools where her friends were “weirdos and people with fundamentalist backgrounds.” The West Indian community was small, but around them was the rich African American culture of the South Side.

In high school she read Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks. At Earlham College, a Quaker school in Indiana (she argued to her parents that it was a Christian institution), she got into ceramics — and majored in philosophy. She was drawn to French feminists like Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray.

Leigh said that it occurred to her recently how much her new work reflects the influence of her hometown’s abundant public art. “I realized that it’s a lot like sculpture that I grew up with in Chicago — the Mirós and Picassos all downtown,” she said. “It’s a similar scale, a similar presence.”

She had found her zone, and it was there all along. — NYT