Boston retrospective of Simone Leigh traces two decades of her art

Through September 4, 2023, theInstitute of Contemporary Art in Boston is hosting a solo exhibition Simone Leigh by the eponymous artist who represented the United States at the fifty-ninth Venice Biennale and was awarded the Golden Lion as the best participant in the international exhibition The Milk of Dreams.

A selection of the works featured in the U.S. Pavilion is presented for the first time in the U.S., in Boston, on this occasion, along with key works from throughout the artist’s career made in clay, bronze, as well as video.

For more than two decades, Simone Leigh has embraced a polyphonic artistic vocabulary in which she has elaborated black feminist thought and paid particular attention to the artistic traditions of Africa and the African diaspora. Leigh often combines the female body with domestic objects or architectural elements.Clay forms the basis of most of her artworks, including her bronze sculptures, which are first molded in clay.

This exhibition, organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee, with Anni A. Pullagura, aims to retrace the artist’s unique visual language through distinctive motifs, including ciprea shells, braids, rosettes, facial vessels and eyeless faces. Through Leigh’s re-execution of these forms in various materials and scales, new structures of thought and meaning emerge, each of which is consistently at the center of black women’s experiences and intellectual work.

The Simone Leigh exhibition will tour to theHirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC (November 2023-March 2024) and jointly to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the California African American Museum (CAAM) in Los Angeles (June 2024-January 2025).

Image: Simone Leigh, Last Garment (2022; bronze, steel, metal, filtration pump, and water, sculpture 137.2 x 147.3 x 68.6 cm, pool size variable). Installation view, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. Credit Simon Leigh.

Boston retrospective of Simone Leigh traces two decades of her art

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