Simone Leigh

The installation was located in a 1914 Bed-Stuy brownstone called the Stuyvesant Mansion, previously owned by notable African-American doctor Josephine English (1920–2011).

Simone Leigh (born 1967) is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States.

She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice.

Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism.

Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society.

Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history.

She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

Simone Leigh was born in 1967 in Chicago, Illinois, to Jamaican missionaries.

She grew up on Chicago's South Side in a highly segregated neighborhood.

Describing her childhood in an interview, Leigh stated "Everyone was black, so I grew up feeling like my blackness didn’t predetermine anything about me. It was very good for my self-esteem. I still feel lucky that I grew up in that crucible."

Leigh attended Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana; she received a BA in Art with a minor in Philosophy in 1990.

"'I came to my artistic practice via the study of philosophy, cultural studies, and a strong interest in African and African American art, which has imbued my object and performance-based work with a concern for the ethnographic, especially the way it records and describes objects.'"After graduating, Leigh planned to become a social worker.

After an internship at the National Museum of African Art and stint at a studio near Charlottesville, Virginia, she embraced art as a career.

Simone Leigh is the creator of the Free People's Medical Clinic a social practice project created with Creative Time in 2014.

A reenactment of the Black Panther Party's initiative of the same name.

In 2015 she remarked "I tried not to be an artist for a really long time but at a certain point I realized I was not going to stop doing it."

Leigh combines her training in American ceramics with an interest in African pottery, using African motifs which tend to have modernist characteristics.

Though she considers herself to be primarily a sculptor, she recently has been involved in social sculpture, or social practice work that engages the public directly.

Her objects often employ materials and forms traditionally associated with African art, and her performance-influenced installations create spaces where historical precedent and self-determination co-mingle.

She describes this combination representing "a collapsing of time."

Her work has been described as part of a generation's reimagining of ceramics in a cross-disciplinary context.

She has given artist lectures in many institutions nationally and internationally, and has taught in the ceramics department of the Rhode Island School of Design.

Leigh organized an event with a group of women artists, who performed in "Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter" part of her solo exhibition, The Waiting Room at the New Museum in 2016.

She was named one of Artsy Editorial's "Most Influential Artists" of 2018.

Her work has been written about in many publications, including Art in America, Artforum, Sculpture Magazine, Modern Painters, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Small Axe, and Bomb magazine.

The Brick House sculpture's torso combines the forms of a skirt and a clay Mousgoum domed hut (or teleuk) while the sculpture's head is crowned with an afro framed by cornrow braids.

This 5,900-pound bronze bust is of a Black woman with a torso standing 16 feet high and 9 feet in diameter at its base.

Leigh's work was selected among "the most important and relevant work" by curators Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley for the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

During her residency at the New Museum, Leigh founded an organization called Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter (BWAforBLM), a collective formed in direct response to the murder of Philando Castille, and in protest against other similar injustices against black lives.

As an homage to this history, Leigh created a walk-in health center with yoga, nutrition and massage sessions, staffed by volunteers in 19th-century nurse uniforms.

She is the recipient of many awards, including: a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Venice Biennale Golden Lion (2022); The Herb Alpert Award; a Creative Capital grant; a Blade of Grass Fellowship; the Studio Museum in Harlem's Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize; the Guggenheim Museum's Hugo Boss Prize; United States Artists fellowship; and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2018).

Brick House is the inaugural commission for the High Line Plinth, a landmark destination for major public artworks in New York City since 2019, and is part of a series of art installations that will rotate every eighteen months and the first space on the High Line dedicated solely to new commissions of contemporary art.

The content of Leigh's sculpture directly contrasts the location in which it is sited in New York since it is situated where "glass-and-steel towers shoot up from among older industrial-era brick buildings, and where architectural and human scales are in constant negotiation."

In October 2020, Leigh was selected to represent the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale.

She is the first black woman to do so.

She was awarded a Golden Lion for her work Brick House in the main exhibition.

The film Conspiracy, featured in her solo show at the Biennale, was co-produced with filmmaker and visual artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich.

Leigh has exhibited internationally including: MoMA PS1, Walker Art Center, Studio Museum in Harlem, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Hammer Museum, The Kitchen, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Tilton Gallery, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, SculptureCenter, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, L'appartement 22 in Rabat, Morocco, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and the Association for Visual Arts Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa.

In 2020, another original Brick House was permanently installed in another urban location (albeit surrounded by a patch of grass) at the key gateway to the University City campus of University of Pennsylvania (near corner of 34th Street and Woodland Walk adjacent to Penn's School of Design).

Brick House is the first piece in Leigh's Anatomy of Architecture collection, an ongoing body of work where the artist combines architectural forms from regions as varied as West Africa and the Southern United States with the human body.