Simone Leigh’s New ICA Boston Show Builds upon Her Acclaimed Venice Biennale Presentation

“I’ve been performing my whole life,” sings Alice Moran Hall in Simone Leigh’s 2011 film Breakdown. Made in collaboration with the performer and Liz Magic Laser, Breakdown sees Leigh stage a performance in her mother’s Harlem church, inspired by the famous nervous breakdowns of high-profile women. As Moran Hall distorts her face and stammers, “I don’t want to go to the ball game,” she enacts a feminine refusal to engage in the charade of femininity.

Though it appears wildly different from Leigh’s most well-known sculptures of Black women’s forms, Breakdown reminds audiences of what the multidisciplinary artist has been doing for decades: deftly unearthing and identifying the emotional and physical labor of Black women across public and private spaces.

Breakdown is featured in the new solo exhibition “Simone Leigh” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. The exhibition, on view in Boston from April 6th through September 4th, will embark on a national tour to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., in the fall of this year, and to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the California African American Museum in the summer of 2024. Billed as a homecoming of “Sovereignty”—Leigh’s exhibition for the U.S. pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale—the new show largely pairs recent works across Leigh’s oeuvre with complementary works from last year’s historic presentation.

“Sovereignty,” which marked the first time a Black woman represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, explored how Black women perform their subjecthood against the backdrop of architectural and representational stereotypes. Nine works from that show reemerge here, giving audiences who did not go to Venice the opportunity to experience the growing monumentality of Leigh’s practice.

Like “Sovereignty,” Leigh’s survey at the ICA is curated by Eva Respini, deputy director of curatorial affairs and the Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the ICA, with curatorial assistant Anna A. Pullagura. “This exhibition really makes the argument for an artist working at the height of her powers and also an artist that has consistently and over time been working with a set of material concerns and intellectual concerns,” Respini said during the press preview. She further emphasized the importance of Black feminist thought to Leigh’s practice, which was emphasized during the three-day symposium “Loophole of Retreat,” which accompanied Leigh’s Venice presentation and featured talks by leading Black feminists in the field, many of whom were in attendance for the opening at the ICA.

Upon entering the exhibition, audiences are immediately greeted with the striking golden-cast bronze sculpture Cupboard (2022), which exemplifies Leigh’s marriage of materiality with Black feminist scholarship. The piece features a bare-breasted, eyeless figure with a buoyant panniered skirt made of raffia. The heaviness of the skirt gives the figure a voluminous intensity that grounds her and makes her stand out. The form, especially the skirt, is loosely based on Diego Velázquez’s portrait of King Philip IV’s family in Las Meninas (1656). Leigh juxtaposes the bodily forms associated with colonial royalty against the eyeless woman of the Black femme, who historically was a servant to these families. In doing so, Leigh creates a tension within gender representation that is separated by race: Not all women have the same history of gender performance and labor.

Cupboard stands next to one of Leigh’s impressive bronze sculptures, Sentential IV (2020). The latter work further exemplifies her interest in materials that place her in relation to Western modernism and, critically, outside of it. The tall, slender feminine form with a spoon as its head is evocative of 20th-century modern abstract sculptures. However, Sentential IV is actually a near replica of a 19th-century fertility symbol of the Zulu people in Africa. The difference in scale from the original symbol is not only a testament to Leigh’s craft, but also her interest in turning everyday objects into monuments of reverence.

As much as Leigh’s practice investigates historical images of Black womanhood, she is also interested in creating miniature avatars of the body, like dolls. Throughout the exhibition, we witness Leigh work with porcelain to evoke baby dolls in her iconic sculptural heads, as seen in Overburdened with Significance (2011), where a series of flowers emerge from a smoked-color face.

In the recent work Slipcover (2023), porcelain plantains clustered together in various colors associated with skin pigmentation are laid against a fabric slipcover. Preservation and consumption are key themes in Slipcover, and indicative of larger themes around Black women’s bodies, both in its performance of femininity and through its labor, that are present in the show. Leigh described the processes of firing clay and doll-making as metaphors for identity-making, in that our identities routinely take various shapes and are forged over time, and often, through violent means.

While performance and form dominate the works on view in “Simone Leigh,” the exhibition does feature several wonderful early works that relate, though slightly diverge from Leigh’s more recent practice. This includes her small-scaled ceramics that feature a wider color palette and evoke a more painterly style. One deep cobalt blue piece, Head with Cobalt (2018), also displays her skillful approach to various firing techniques. The face jug shimmers with a distinctive surface that was achieved from adding salt to the kiln, a technique that originated from potters in South Carolina.

Another is White Teeth (for Ota Benga), a 2004 sculpture that features porcelain pointed “teeth” stuffed into a metal case. The sculpture, which is earliest work on view in the show, marked a pivotal moment in Leigh’s practice. “[It was] made on the kitchen table when I had a really young child, and when I realized that I wasn’t going to stop making these things and I had to declare myself an artist,” Leigh explained to audiences at the opening.

White Teeth references the enslaved man Ota Benga, whose likeness may be known to many for having his teeth sharpened to render him a subject of curiosity at the World’s Fair in St. Louis in 1904 and then at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. After he was freed, Benga committed suicide. “[The work symbolizes] my very fraught relationship to anthropology, the World’s Fair, [and] the display of the Black body which oftentimes, in the case of Ota Benga, that the thing that made him so commercially viable and exciting is what led to his demise,” Leigh said.

The core of the exhibition, however, is Leigh’s ongoing integration of labor, architecture, and Black women’s bodies as evident with the concluding sculpture Last Garment (2022). The work features a Black woman washing clothes in a large pool of water. The form, historically, has been featured across postcards to perpetuate the image of the “noble savage” as dutiful in completing domestic labor.