Massive new sculpture debuts on MFAH grounds

A colossal new sculpture by American artist Simone Leigh is being installed on the campus of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston this week, and you’re likely to see it outside the museum’s Kinder building the next time you drive by.

Called Satellite, the 24-foot-tall bronze sculpture evokes traditional African depictions of fertility and femininity. According to the museum, Leigh took inspiration from the D’mba headdresses made by the Baga peoples of Guinea, the ceremonial ladles of the Dan peoples, and vernacular traditions across the African Diaspora. Installation of the sculpture, which weighs about 6,000 pounds, began on the morning of Nov. 28 and was expected to be completed that day.

In 2022, Leigh, who is from Chicago, made history as the first Black woman to represent the United States during the 59th Venice Biennale. The original edition of Satellite was the centerpiece of the Biennale’s American pavilion. Houston’s version of the cast-and-welded sculpture, the second edition of the work, is the first to be acquired and installed permanently at a U.S. museum.

Though she works in several mediums, including film and performance art, she is best known for her sculptures, many of which are monumental in scope and size. A different Leigh sculpture, the 10-foot-tall Sentinel IV, is on display at the University of Texas Anna Hiss Gymnasium Courtyard.

According to the MFAH, Satellite is about honoring the historically undervalued labor—both physical and intellectual—of Black women. “In order to tell the truth,” Leigh has said, “you need to invent what might be missing from the archive, to collapse time, to concern yourself with issues of scale, to formally move things around in a way that reveals something more true than fact.”

Satellite will be installed in two stages, thanks to careful preparations by MFAH conservators, engineers, art handlers and a crane operator. The first section, which looks like a woman’s torso with four table-like legs, will be lifted onto a reinforced cement slab and anchored into place. The second component, a disc-like head that measures 10 feet across and weighs almost 3,000 lbs, will then be placed on top.

The statue is being installed in front of the Kinder Building, next to Cristina Iglesias’s water sculpture Inner Landscape, which floods and drains similar to a coastal flood plain. Satellite will also be situated near the museum’s sculpture garden, next to another monumental sculpture by a contemporary artist, Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Column.