How outsize African clay sculptures of stereotype-baiting goddesses placed the artist on the artworld's radar

Simone Leigh: on the rise

<p>When Simone Leigh first began exploring the subjective concerns of black women through the medium of ceramics in the early 1990s, she was warned by other ceramicists that she would never be accepted in the contemporary artworld; but her work, shaped by ethnographic research, feminism and racial politics, never really fit in with the ceramics world either.</p><p>Times have changed for both the medium – now regularly exhibited in contemporary art galleries – and the artist, who, at 51, suddenly finds herself an artworld star. Leigh is the first artist commissioned by New York City’s High Line to make a monumental public sculpture for a plinth anchoring the last section of the park, opening next April. This fall she had a debut show at Luhring Augustine with new ceramic female sculptures, in which three of her large-scale pieces were snapped up by as many institutions. And in October she won the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss prize, only the second African-American woman (besides Lorna Simpson) ever to be shortlisted. She will have a solo exhibition of new work at the museum, which opens April 19, 2019.</p>

<p>For the Berlin Biennial this year, she regrouped many of the players in these works for a video based on the TV series <em style="background-color: initial;">M*A*S*H</em>, recast entirely with black women. It is a meditation, at times humorous, on the survival skills of black women in the setting of an army surgical unit.&nbsp;‘In order to survive or succeed, you have to take care of yourself, and a lot of times that means you might have to walk away from someone else who’s sick,’&nbsp;says Leigh, who juxtaposed women doing yoga with people laid out on stretchers, ignored.&nbsp;‘Black women have typically made really poor decisions for that front, of giving to others to their own detriment.’ She hopes to make a sequel to her M*A*S*H video with the same collaborators next year.<br /><br />Leigh attributes some of the new interest in her sculpture to these performance-based works, which have given people a different lens for understanding the ceramics.&nbsp;‘When I was doing the <em style="background-color: initial;">Free People’s Medical Clinic</em>, I was trying to imagine the ideas I was already working with but just live,’&nbsp;she says.&nbsp;<br /><br />Shedding light on some of those underlying connections, she describes how she fires her ceramics in atmospheric kilns, where she can change the color and texture of the objects by altering the environment with salt or wood ash.&nbsp;‘Most people don’t understand why that might be really similar to identity formation,’&nbsp;she says.&nbsp;‘People may not know how fraught Orientalism is in ceramics and the irony of trying to use these processes to do something different.’&nbsp;</p><style> p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 15.0px; font: 13.0px Arial; color: #000000; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000; background-color: #ffffff} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} </style><style> p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 15.0px; font: 13.0px Arial; color: #000000; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000; background-color: #ffffff} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} </style><style> p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 15.0px; font: 13.0px Arial; color: #000000; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000; background-color: #ffffff} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} </style><style> p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 15.0px; font: 13.0px Arial; color: #000000; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000; background-color: #ffffff} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} </style>

<p>Simone Leigh’s work will be shown by Luhring Augustine&nbsp;in the Galleries sector of the 2018 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. Discover more artists and galleries participating in this year’s Galleries sector&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach/exhibitors" target="_blank">here</a>.</p><p>This article was taken from Art Basel Miami Beach magazine. The magazine will be available at the show and in select locations around Miami Beach.&nbsp;</p><p><em>Top image&nbsp;Simone Leigh&nbsp;trophallaxis, 2008-2017,&nbsp;&nbsp;</em><em>&copy; Simone Leigh; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. Photos: Farzad Owrang.&nbsp;</em></p>

Inspired by the brutal history of Colonia Dignidad, the film is a must-see at Art Basel Miami Beach

Filmmakers Cristobal Leon and Joaquin Cociña turn Chile’s darkest hour into a stop-motion fairy tale

Jonathan Garnham’s project space-turned-gallery nurtures some of the most exciting talents emerging from South Africa

Meet the gallerist spearheading the Cape Town art scene

Curator Philipp Kaiser and The Kitchen's Executive Director Tim Griffin sit down with the artist to talk about his special project with choreographer Bárbara Foulkes

Abraham Cruzvillegas will build a dance stage out of trash to inaugurate Art Basel Miami Beach’s Grand Ballroom

Leigh那呈現典型女戰神形象的的巨大非洲陶瓷雕塑使她在藝壇廣受注目