Simone Leigh facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Simone Leigh
Leigh in 2017
Born	1967 (age 56–57) Chicago, Illinois
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Earlham College
Awards	Guggenheim Fellowship Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award Creative Capital grantee Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Michael Richards Award Joan Mitchell Foundation grant Artist-in-Residence The Studio Museum in Harlem New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship Art Matters Foundation grant Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2018) Hugo Boss Prize (2018) Venice Biennale Golden Lion (2022)

Simone Leigh (born 1967) is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States. She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society. Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

Early life and education

Simone Leigh was born in 1967 in Chicago, Illinois, to Jamaican missionaries. She grew up on Chicago's South Side in a highly segregated neighborhood. Describing her childhood in an interview, Leigh stated "Everyone was black, so I grew up feeling like my blackness didn’t predetermine anything about me. It was very good for my self-esteem. I still feel lucky that I grew up in that crucible."

Leigh attended Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana; she received a BA in Art with a minor in Philosophy in 1990.

Career

"I came to my artistic practice via the study of philosophy, cultural studies, and a strong interest in African and African American art, which has imbued my object and performance-based work with a concern for the ethnographic, especially the way it records and describes objects."

After graduating, Leigh planned to become a social worker. After an internship at the National Museum of African Art and stint at a studio near Charlottesville, Virginia, she embraced art as a career. In 2015 she remarked "I tried not to be an artist for a really long time but at a certain point I realized I was not going to stop doing it."

Leigh combines her training in American ceramics with an interest in African pottery, using African motifs which tend to have modernist characteristics. Though she considers herself to be primarily a sculptor, she recently has been involved in social sculpture, or social practice work that engages the public directly. Her objects often employ materials and forms traditionally associated with African art, and her performance-influenced installations create spaces where historical precedent and self-determination co-mingle. She describes this combination representing "a collapsing of time." Her work has been described as part of a generation's reimagining of ceramics in a cross-disciplinary context. She has given artist lectures in many institutions nationally and internationally, and has taught in the ceramics department of the Rhode Island School of Design.

Leigh lecturing in 2013

In October 2020, Leigh was selected to represent the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale. She is the first black woman to do so. She was awarded a Golden Lion for her work Brick House in the main exhibition. The film Conspiracy, featured in her solo show at the Biennale, was co-produced with filmmaker and visual artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich.

Recognition

Leigh is a recipient of the Venice Biennale Golden Lion (2022); the Studio Museum in Harlem's Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (2017); John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2016); Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2016); Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2016); and A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art (2016). Guggenheim Fellowship (2012), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, Creative Capital Grantee, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Micheal Richards Award (2012), Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Artist-in-Residence The Studio Museum in Harlem (2010–11), NYFA Fellowship, Art Matters Foundation Grant (2009), Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2018), The Hugo Boss Prize (2018) (a $100,000 award facilitated by the Guggenheim Museum that ranks among the world's top art prizes).

Art market

As of 2021, Leigh was represented by Matthew Marks Gallery. She was previously represented by Hauser & Wirth (2019-2021), David Kordansky Gallery (2019), and Luhring Augustine Gallery (2016–2019).

In 2023, Leigh's sculpture Stick (2019), sold for $2.7 million at Christie's in New York, a record for the artist. Her previous auction record, a life-size mixed media female head titled Birmingham (2012), was sold for $2.2 million at Sotheby’s in New York in 2022.

Exhibitions

Leigh has staged many solo shows at galleries and museums in the United States and internationally, as well as several solo public art installations. Her solo shows include Simone Leigh (2004) Momenta Art, New York; if you wan fo’ lick old woman pot, you scratch him back (2008), Rush Arts Gallery, New York; You Don’t Know Where Her Mouth Has Been (2012), The Kitchen, New York; Gone South (2014), Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; The Waiting Room (2016), New Museum, New York; Psychic Friends Network (2016), Tate Modern, London; inHarlem: Simone Leigh (2016), Marcus Garvey Park, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Loophole of Retreat (2019), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Brick House (2019), High Line, New York; Simone Leigh (2021), Hauser & Wirth, Zurich; Trophallaxis (2008-17), Pérez Art Museum Miami (2022-2023); Sovereignty (2022), American pavilion, 59th Venice Biennale; and Simone Leigh (2023), originating at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

Leigh has also participated in many group exhibitions, including the Dakar Biennale (2014); Berlin Biennale (2019); Whitney Biennial (2019); Prospect.5 (2021), Prospect New Orleans; and The Milk of Dreams (2022), 59th Venice Biennale.

In 2024, Leigh had simultaneous exhibitions in Southern California at both the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the California African American Museum (CAAM).

Notable works in public collections

See also

In Spanish: Simone Leigh para niños