Simone Leigh at the Venice Biennale

 I first saw her art at the Guggenheim and took a picture of the large sculpture piece and just remember them being the most memorable of the pieces I saw that day.

Simone Leigh is the first African American to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2022, the world’s top art festival. She was commissioned to do the pavilion by the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. Here’s an introduction to her art:

Black female subjectivity

Her art is focused on Black women and their journey to succeeding despite all the odds being against them. Despite being marginalized in society, she frames them as being central to all of society through her art.

A motif that reappears and is distinctive about her sculptures is the presence of cowrie shells which were a common form of currency in West Africa. She subverts that by instilling them on the bodies of her subjects. Another one is watermelons, because they have commonly been used to depict African American women as “large, overgrown, and fat.”

Hidden eyes

Leigh often smooths over the eyes of the subject, which are the most distinctive features of the face to show how the psychological desires and thoughts are too complex to understand for most people and that no matter how much we want to empathize, sometimes it’s just not possible. There’s also a sense of mysetry and secretiveness in the eyes, which are often symbols of windows to the soul. By depriving viewers of them, Leigh juxtaposes the immense size and detail of the sculpture with the inscrutability of the mind. There is also a third meaning to the eyes, the undercurrent of racist histories, colonialism, sexism, and white supremecy. It shows through the nondescript characteristics a sort of implicit understanding that all black women both of past and present can understand and identify with. Thus, she says her primary audience of her art is black women.

Mainstream Fame

She has won the Guggenheim Museum’s $100,000 Hugo Boss Prize in 2018 and a $50,000 United States Artists Fellowship in 2019. In 2019, she appeared in the Whitney Biennial, and she will be part of the Prospect New Orleans triennial in 2021.

Her Venice Biennale pavilion is set to bring Leigh her greatest exposure to date and with it, her art is seeing the most exposure to date.