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| Installation view of "Simone Leigh" at California African American Museum. In foreground is Breeze Box, 2022. All, except as noted: Courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery |
The ICA/Boston-organized Simone Leigh exhibition has landed in Los Angeles, split between LACMA and the California African American Museum. Obvious questions: Which venue to see first? Is it necessary to see both?
I don't think there's an answer beyond saying that both parts of the show are eminently worth seeing. If there's any simple logic as to why a particular piece is at one venue and not the other, it escapes me. The exhibition is only 30 pieces, so it's not like it's too big for one museum or one attention span. It's split 17/13 between LACMA/CAAM.
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| Simone Leigh, Satellite, 2022. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (not in show) |
"Simone Leigh" brings to the West Coast many of the magisterial works shown at the 2022 Venice Biennale's U.S. pavilion. Unfortunately, the pivotal Venice sculpture, Satellite, didn't make it to L.A. Neither venue had suitable space for it, in part because of ongoing construction. (The Houston Museum of Fine Arts bought and is displaying one of the two editions.)
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| Simone Leigh, Sentinel, 2022, at LACMA |
LACMA has installed a 16-ft-tall Sentinel in front of the Resnick Pavilion, and CAAM has the bronze and gold version of Cupboard outside. A sign declares that the sculpture is under 24-hour surveillance—as well it should be in a city that swipes 4th-rate statues for their copper.
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Simone Leigh, Cupboard, 2022, at CAAM
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The title
Cupboard is shared by two sculptures, the other a raffia hut/cone topped with a faux cowry shell. The raffia
Cupboard introduces the CAAM gallery of Leigh's exhibition.
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| Simone Leigh, Cupboard, 2022, at CAAM. Glenstone Museum, Pontiac, Maryland |
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| Simone Leigh, Last Garment, 2022, at LACMA |
Leigh's sculptures are some of the most formally sophisticated being made today. They reference a history of appalling representations of Black women, often in a coded way.
Last Garment, a stooped figure of a woman doing laundry in a reflecting pool, has the character of a tasteful contemporary monument. It is in fact based on a racist stereograph,
Mammy's last garment, Jamaica (1899), that promoted island tourism.
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| Last Garment with Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass, 2012 |
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| Simone Leigh, Martinique, 2022, at LACMA |
Napoleon's wife Josephine is both a favorite daughter and villain to her native Martinique. She is believed to have lobbied for her husband's 1802 executive order reinstating slavery in the French colonies. In 1859, Napoleon III (grandson of her husband) commissioned a statue of Josephine for Fort-de-France. The statue was beheaded in 1991 and splattered with red paint. The statue was left headless and vandalized successively until its complete destruction after the death of George Floyd. Leigh reinvents the headless statue in blue-glazed ceramic. The hand-cupped breasts are an African welcome; the dress is out of volume VASE to VELÁZQUEZ in some multiverse Wikipedia.
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| Simone Leigh, untitled, 2021-22. LACMA, promised gift of Justin Lubliner |
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| Simone Leigh, Uhura #3 (Tanaka) (video still), 2012, at CAAM |
Three video pieces, all at CAAM, are collaborative and relatively early (c. 2011-12). Uhura #3 (Tanaka) invokes TV's original Afrofuturist, Lt. Uhura of the Enterprise. Star Trek was Martin Luther King Jr.'s favorite TV show.
 | | Simone Leigh, Kool-Aid, 2011-23, at CAAM |
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references Chicago's AfriCOBRA movement, its name punning on the postwar European COBRA. The Chicago group unpacked its name as African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists. It promised "images that appeal to senses—not to the intellect." Simone's interpretation, conceived in 2011, casts artificial coloring on salt-filled glass tits, modeled from watermelons.
"Simone Leigh" runs through Jan. 20, 2025, at both venues.
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