Simone Leigh’s stellar presentation for the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale last year will now tour America, starting at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston this month before heading to in Washington, DC and Los Angeles. It’s “the core of the larger story” of Leigh’s work, says Eva Respini, the ICA Boston curator who also curated Leigh’s exhibition in Venice. Surprisingly, given his notoriety in recent years, Leigh hasn’t had a survey of American museums so far. It’s “equally shocking,” says Respini, that Leigh’s first monograph is only now being published, to accompany the show.
“Each piece of art is carefully calibrated and has such a big impact on its own”
Eva Respini, curator
Respini hopes “people will see a guiding line” in Leigh’s career, where ideas and form are “articulated, reiterated and, I would say, even replayed”. The artist, born in Chicago in 1967, has “created her own unique visual language”, by exploiting and developing certain materials such as ceramics and raffia, to create “layers of stories across the diaspora…that ‘they are from the African continent, the Caribbean or first American references “, explains Respini. “The idea of locating black women and their subjectivity in everything she does, it has been there from the beginning, “adds -She.
Sandstone, raffia and steel sculpture by Simone Leigh Cabinet IX (2019) from his solo touring show which begins in Boston © the artist; courtesy of ICA Boston
Leigh’s eyeless female figures are often sculpted in a “bell-shaped or domed shape, which on the one hand looks like a skirt and on the other looks like a dwelling…you see this hinged shape over and over and Again. The cowrie is another example.
Respini calls the Boston show “a homecoming.” The Venice pavilion was all the more impactful for its beautiful sobriety and she promises that the ICA presentation will be “just as incisive… each work is carefully calibrated and has such a great impact on its own”. Certain works will be adapted: putting in a swimming pool for Last Garment (2022), a bronze sculpture based on a 19th century photograph of a Jamaican laundress, will be made on a larger scale than Leigh had originally planned. It will be located on the Boston Harbor waterfront, at the Massachusetts Bay site. “So there will be these breathtaking resonances in the way there was in Venice,” Respini says.
• Simone Leigh, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, April 6-September 24
