Simone Leigh at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

"A more nuanced, more subtle, more bold, more complicated, and more varied representation of black women."

Nov 20, 2024

Last week I went to the Simone Leigh exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Simone Leigh is a Black American artist from Chicago who works in New York City. She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, and performance. Leigh has said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history.

In 2022 Leigh became the first black woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, where she won the Golden Lion award. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

Simone Leigh at LACMA is a traveling exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) / Boston and co-presented in Los Angeles by LACMA and the California African American Museum. According to LACMA, the exhibition features approximately 20 years of Leigh’s production in ceramic, bronze, video, and installation, as well as works from her 2022 Venice Biennale presentation.

About her work, Leigh told PBS NewsHour:

I hope that my work shows a more nuanced, more subtle, more bold, more complicated, and more varied representation of black women.

(See the video below)

Leigh’s father immigrated from Jamaica. Caribbean motifs run through her sculptures.

The piece in the photo at the top of the page, and below, is Last Garment by Simone Leigh, a 2022 bronze sculpture installation in pool of water. According the description, it references C.H, Graves’s Mammy’s Last Garment (1899), a stereoscopic photograph of a Jamaican laundress.