Simone Leigh, LACMA, Resnick Pavilion CAAM, Gallery 1 & Theater Gallery
Los Angeles, USA
May 26, 2024 – January 20, 2025

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the California African American Museum (CAAM) present Simone Leigh, the first comprehensive survey of this celebrated artist’s richly layered practice and her most expansive exhibition on the West Coast to date. Presented across both institutions, the exhibition explores dozens of key works from throughout Leigh’s career, including pieces from the artist’s landmark 2022 Venice Biennale project. Marking the final stop in Simone Leigh’s national tour, this joint presentation offers visitors the chance to experience a range of works not shown at previous venues, including the artist’s lesser-known chandelier works and a new sculpture titled Untitled (after June Jordan).

Over the past two decades, Leigh has situated questions of Black femme, or female-identified, subjectivity at the center of contemporary art discourse. Her sculpture, video, installation, and social practice explore ideas of race, beauty, and community in visual and material culture. Informed by rigorous attention to a swath of historical periods, geographies, and artistic traditions of Africa and the African diaspora, Leigh often combines the female body with domestic vessels or architectural elements to point to unacknowledged acts of labor and care, particularly among and for Black women. While Leigh – one of the most respected artists of her generation – has exhibited in prominent museums throughout the United States, this survey invites audiences to experience the breadth of her work for the first time in Los Angeles.

Simone Leigh is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston and Eva Respini, Deputy Director and Director of Curatorial Programs, Vancouver Art Gallery (former Barbara Lee Chief Curator, ICA/Boston), with Anni A. Pullagura, Assistant Curator, ICA/Boston. LACMA and CAAM’s co-presentation is curated by Rita Gonzalez, Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head, Contemporary Art, LACMA, Naima J. Keith, Vice President, Education and Public Programs, LACMA, and Taylor Renee Aldridge, Visual Arts Curator, CAAM.

Gonzalez and Keith noted, “The exhibition’s two-decade scope allows unprecedented insight into how Leigh elevates and monumentalizes moments that have been obscured, as she continually pushes the boundaries of her materials with new methods and larger scales.”

“Because Leigh’s work is in conversation with Black feminist thought through a global lens – past, present, and future – this show allows our regionally specific institutions to focus on diaspora in ways that challenge concepts of local and global, and that connect seemingly disparate contexts of African (American) history throughout the world,” Aldridge added.

“We are thrilled to bring this historic exhibition to Los Angeles in collaboration with our colleagues at CAAM,” said Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. “Simone Leigh is such an important voice in contemporary art, and our collaboration with CAAM is a powerful way to bring her first major exhibition on the West Coast to the widest audience possible.”

Cameron Shaw, CAAM Executive Director, said, “In addition to broadening the audience engagement for this significant exhibition, the collaboration between LACMA and CAAM offers a rich opportunity to consider Leigh’s work within our distinct institutional contexts and histories, underscoring the dynamic and nuanced layers in the artist’s practice around how perspectives on Black femme identities are shaped and by whom.”

Divided across two venues, the exhibition will present the range of Leigh’s intersectional practice. CAAM’s chapter will emphasize Leigh’s innovative cinematic collaborations while LACMA’s will spotlight large-scale sculptural works. Both venues will present pieces featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale.

For two decades, Leigh has been creating large-scale chandelier sculptures. Trophallaxis refers to a biological exchange from one organism to another. With this nomenclature, Leigh casts breast-like forms from watermelons. Each bulbous form is suspended from the ceiling and attached with antennae. There are no identical shapes because some of them have cracked gold-plated areolae, boot-prints, lattices, and irregularities. This work showcases the change and continuity in Leigh’s chandelier works and breast forms that appear on her figural sculpture throughout her career.

About Simone Leigh
Over the last 20 years, Simone Leigh has created a multi-faceted body of work incorporating sculpture, video, and installation, all informed by her ongoing exploration of Black female-identified subjectivity. Leigh describes her work as autoethnographic, and her salt-glazed ceramic and bronze sculptures often employ forms traditionally associated with African art. Leigh first began exhibiting her work in the early 2000s and she has had one-person museum exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, in New York; The Tate Gallery, in London; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among other institutions. In 2014 she presented The Free People’s Medical Clinic in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, a project commissioned by Creative Time. Her work was included in the 2012 and 2019 Biennial exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and she is the first artist to be commissioned for the High Line Plinth; her monumental sculpture Brick House was unveiled in April 2019. In 2022, Leigh represented the United States at the 59th Venice Biennale with her exhibition Simone Leigh: Sovereignty. Her work was also included in the Biennale’s central exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Participant. Her work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York The Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the ICA/Boston, among others.

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