The Venice Biennale, which takes place every other year and features top artists from more than 75 countries, is perhaps the biggest and most significant visual art showcase in the world. It’s not often that a piece of Venice comes stateside, so a new survey of the work from artist Simone Leigh at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is a special occasion. Curators from ICA Boston submitted Leigh for consideration to represent the United States at the 59th Venice Biennale, which ran from April to November of 2022, and that museum was the first stop for Leigh’s touring exhibit, which displays pieces from her landmark Venice exhibition as well as some works that are making their debut at the Hirshhorn.
At every location of the tour, the exhibit is reimagined for a new space. “The thing about the [Venice] pavilion is it’s almost a three-quarter size building. It feels a little dollhouse, it’s a little bit smaller than you expect it to be,” Leigh said at a press event on Nov. 1, two days before the exhibit named simply Simone Leigh opened. At the Hirshhorn, there’s more room to spread out, as well as some challenges working within the doughnut-shaped building. “The shape of the building was constantly present in the installation, there’s not many 90 degree angles, there’s always a curve. So it was hard to install, but I found a lot of the solutions really exciting, and I’m really pleased with the installation here,” Leigh explains.
The artist, a native of Chicago who now works in New York, has good reason to be pleased: The show is an absolute knockout. The exhibit covers more than 20 years of Leigh’s work and shows her dexterity with different materials and mastery of historical references. Leigh was the first Black woman to represent the U.S. at Venice, and her body of work is an ode to Black women’s labor, intellect, and physicality. She is something of a historian and researcher as well as an artist, and she excavates everything from the artistry of enslaved potters to racist souvenir postcards to ceremonial talismans and structures. The artist once worked as an intern at the National Museum of African Art, where she “[Xeroxed] everything I could find on making an African pot.”
The gallery opens with “Cupboard,” which looks like a towering hoop skirt made of cascading raffia topped with a stoneware cowrie shell. The shells and skirts are frequent motifs in Leigh’s work, along with small rosettes that are individually formed and grouped in large quantities to create hair. A highlight of the exhibit is a gallery featuring three bronze figurative sculptures being displayed for the very first time. They tower over the viewer like imposing supermodels, and one titled “Bisi” features a torso atop a hollowed-out, bell-shaped skirt. At a walk-through of the gallery, Leigh revealed, “I actually made it with the proportion that I’d be able to stand inside her skirt,” and stepped inside to demonstrate.
That intimacy that the artist has with her pieces and with the clay is a throughline in her body of work. The monumental bronze sculptures are first molded from clay, with the artist working on objects much larger than herself, and she’s previously described that “my hand is like a fine tool at that scale.” Bronze sculptures are often created to look as smooth and sturdy as possible, with any soft edges from the clay casting refined sharply and buffed to perfection. In Leigh’s bronzes, the texture and malleability of the clay is still apparent, with visible traces of the artist’s hand and doughy corners that look like they could still be shaped. “Conspiracy,” a video piece made in collaboration with Brooklyn-based visual artist and filmmaker Madeleine Hunt–Ehrlich, partly documents Leigh shaping clay and working with potters tools.
The galleries also include several monumentally scaled ceramic works. “Jug” is a boulder-size jug shape bedecked with cowrie shells. A pair of life-size stoneware sphinxes oversee one of the galleries, where they sit alongside “Martinique,” an electric blue headless woman that references a monument to Napoleon Bonaparte’s slavery-endorsing first wife in the titular city. These works defy the dismissal of ceramics as a serious artistic discipline all too often written off as crafty or utilitarian. Leigh works with a scale, precision, and depth of meaning that is impossible to ignore. “I’m not sure why the material clay became so taboo for several years,” the artist says. “You look at cultures like Pompeii, and what we have left is pottery.”
Simone Leigh is on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden until March 3, 2024. hirshhorn.si.edu. Free.