Two other shows in 2016, at the Tate Exchange in London and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, introduced her ceramic sculpture to a wider audience. Tilton had arranged for her to show at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, for which she made six small busts of imaginary women, with multicolored ceramic rosettes for hair; all of them sold at the preview. “There was something about them that stopped people in their tracks,” Lauren Hudgins Shuman, A. C. Hudgins’s daughter, recalled. Shuman worked for Jack Tilton, and to her the show was clearly “a turning point in terms of recognition.” It was also Leigh’s last show with Tilton. His gallery lacked the resources to handle Leigh’s expanding career as a major artist, and Tilton was not well. After the Armory show closed, Leigh decided, with great reluctance, to leave the Tilton Gallery and move to Luhring Augustine, a larger gallery with a strong roster of artists. Breaking the news to Tilton, she said, was agonizing.
“Simone is never comfortable, and so her work never stops expanding and growing,” Rashida Bumbray told me recently. (Bumbray is now the director of culture and art at the Open Society Foundations.) It would have been unthinkable for Leigh to repeat herself with more of the ceramic busts that had been such a success at the Park Avenue Armory. In 2018, she won the Hugo Boss Prize, and the following year she appeared in her first Whitney Biennial. She also began doing full-length sculptures of Black women. The figures are bare-breasted and seven or eight feet tall, and they wear voluminous hoop skirts made of raffia. A few of them have generic facial features; in others the eyes are missing, or the face is blank. One has what looks like a floral wreath where her face should be. (“I toggle back and forth between abstraction and figuration,” Leigh told an interviewer.) “Only in retrospect did I see that this was a natural evolution of form, from the water pot to the full figure,” Leigh told me.
In the spring of 2019, a sixteen-foot bronze bust of a Black woman appeared on the High Line in New York. Mounted on a plinth, it was clearly visible to pedestrians and people in cars and taxis on Tenth Avenue, and its power caught and held their attention. Her hair was done in long braids, and her torso had an architectural dimension, which echoed the traditional building styles of the Mousgoum people of Cameroon. (Two years earlier, Leigh had been similarly inspired by dome-shaped, mud-and-raffia kitchen houses, called imbas, from Zimbabwe; she had built three of these structures for a show at Marcus Garvey Park, in Harlem.) Her monumental High Line sculpture was figurative and abstract, a mysterious and majestic goddess of Black womanhood.
Cecilia Alemani, the High Line’s curator of art projects, had commissioned the piece in 2016. “I was very impressed by her work at the Kitchen show,” Alemani told me. “It was definitely something unexpected compared to what was going on at the time, and I could see that with the right support she could push her practice to another level.” The High Line gave Leigh a quarter of a million dollars to make the sculpture, and Alemani and her team introduced her to the Strattons. It was Leigh’s first bronze sculpture. She made the full-scale clay model in the Stratton studio, and rented an apartment in Philadelphia so that she could be there for the casting, which took seven months. “Somehow my thirty years of working with clay had made me really good at clay modelling for bronze,” she said. “I had no idea I would be so comfortable working at that scale.”
“Brick House,” the sculpture’s title, came from a documentary film Leigh had seen about St. Louis, a city made largely of brick, but it also referred to an expression in Black culture. “If I called someone a brick house, any Black person would know what I was talking about,” she explained. “It’s a woman who’s—I hesitate to use the word ‘strong,’ because of the stereotypes of Black women as towers of strength. It’s about the idea of an ideal woman, but very different from the Western ideal woman, who is fragile. Unfortunately, I think people just related it to the song ‘Brick House,’ which was released by the Commodores in the nineteen-seventies.” (“Ow, she’s a brick house / She’s mighty-mighty, just lettin’ it all hang out.”) Leigh now wishes she had called it something else, even just “Untitled.” But nothing could lessen the sculpture’s impact as a work of public art. “The Strattons said something I thought was really significant,” Leigh added. “They said that ‘Brick House’ was the first time in their career they had made a work that wasn’t making fun of something else. It’s not ironic, it’s straightforward.”
Leigh authorized three other castings of “Brick House.” She owns one, and Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman, influential New York collectors, bought the two others—they kept the first and donated the second to the University of Pennsylvania, their alma mater, where it stands on ground level outside the arts building. Leigh took me there when I was in Philadelphia, so that I could see, as she put it, “how different it is when you can relate it to your own body, without the plinth.” Cecilia Alemani is directing this year’s Venice Biennale. She has arranged for “Brick House” to travel by boat to Venice, where it will occupy a prominent spot in her big international exhibition.
Leigh and I met again in July, at her waterfront studio in Red Hook. The studio is on the ground floor of a warehouse building that overlooks a large section of New York Harbor, including the Statue of Liberty. Leigh had moved into it a few months earlier, after a yearlong, million-dollar renovation that included a complex ventilation system for three kilns. Leigh, wearing a bright-orange, ankle-length dress and white clogs, showed me around. “This is the big deal,” she said, standing in front of a six-foot-high salt-and-soda kiln. “It’s an atmospheric kiln—the closest that ceramics come to true alchemy. At the height of the firing, around two thousand and three hundred degrees, you introduce salt, which is dispersed throughout the atmosphere of the kiln and combines with the silica in the clay to create a unique kind of glaze. You change the object by changing the atmosphere. The results are often not what you’d expect. After thirty years, I still don’t know exactly what’s coming out of the kiln, and I love that. I lose between twenty-five and fifty per cent of what I build—things that don’t make it through the firing.” Two smaller kilns, one of which is about to be replaced by a state-of-the-art Blaauw model, from the Netherlands, occupy separate spaces in the studio. “We can experiment with temperatures and glazes. It’s just endless play.”
In the main workroom, a large, rectangular space with glass doors that lead to a promenade on the water, a studio assistant—one of six—was working on the raffia skirt of an eyeless woman. Five other female figures, finished or nearly finished, each one different, took up the rest of the space. All of them were leaving in a few days for Zurich, where Leigh’s first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, her new gallery, would open in September. Leigh had left Luhring Augustine in 2020. The gallery had done very well with her work, raising her prices significantly, getting her sculptures into museum collections, and connecting her with the David Kordansky gallery in Los Angeles, but Leigh had found that she disliked the complications of working with more than one dealer. Invitations to show her work were coming from a wide range of museums and galleries, and she had decided that she would be better off with one of the big international galleries like Hauser & Wirth, which has branches in all the major art centers and would assign one person to represent her.
The large sculptures in her Zurich show were priced at seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and they all sold in the first week. By then, though, Leigh had decided to leave Hauser & Wirth. “It’s just not appropriate for me,” she said. “It wasn’t a good fit.” Her second gallery change in less than two years drew notice inside and outside the art world. The story broke in ArtNews on October 29th, with statements of mutual love and respect from Leigh and from Hauser & Wirth, and the news was widely reported. In an Instagram post (now deleted) that went viral, a clip from the 2004 German film “Downfall,” about Hitler’s final days, which has been parodied repeatedly in recent years, was adapted to depict Iwan Wirth, the gallery’s co-founder, as the Führer, screaming imprecations at his cowed staff. (“We look like goddam idiots! . . . And don’t fucking tell me she went to Pace!”) Leigh weathered the brouhaha, with irritation and some amusement. A month later, after receiving offers from many top galleries, she joined Matthew Marks, whose roster includes Robert Gober, Jasper Johns, Vija Celmins, Katharina Fritsch, Martin Puryear, and Charles Ray. “I feel honored to be in that gallery,” she told me, sounding not a bit demure.
Leigh’s exhibition at the Venice Biennale was commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Jill Medvedow, the institution’s director, and Eva Respini, its chief curator, had conceived the show in 2019, as a mid-career retrospective, and it will be re-created as such, with additions and a catalogue (the first major one on her work), in 2023. For Venice, Leigh hired her own project manager, Susan Thompson, who speaks Italian fluently, and her own architect, Pierpaolo Martiradonna, who designed her Red Hook studio. Martiradonna reinforced the gallery floors so that they can support the large bronze sculptures, and carried out Leigh’s request to give the somewhat prissy, faux-classical U.S. pavilion a thatched roof. (The costs were largely offset by major grants from the Mellon and Ford Foundations.) Leigh subsidized the making, with Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, of a poetic film about the ethnographic portrayal of ceramic work, which will be on view in one of the galleries. This was in keeping with what Zenobia describes as her mother’s “Act like you’ve got it until you get it” approach to life.
Leigh, who admits to being “a little bit of a conference whore,” and her friend Rashida Bumbray are currently organizing a meeting of Black women artists, writers, and academics, called “Loophole of Retreat,” which will take place at the Biennale from October 8th to the 11th. It is a continuation of a gathering, with the same title, at the Guggenheim in 2019, the year Leigh had her show there. The title refers to an 1861 memoir called “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” by Harriet Jacobs, who spent seven years in a crawl space in her grandmother’s attic (the “loophole of retreat”), hiding from her brutish owner. Leigh recruited the scholars Saidiya Hartman and Tina Campt, both of whom she met at the Berlin Biennale in 2018, as curatorial advisers. “It will be an intellectual free-for-all,” Leigh said, “part two of an ongoing project to create a place for Black women intellectuals. Saidiya said that the academy does not believe there is such a thing as a Black woman intellectual, and that struck me.” Naomi Beckwith, the deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum, talked to me recently about Leigh’s unwavering focus on womanhood. “I think Simone is through and through a feminist,” she said. “In form, in material, in subject, in objects, and even in her literary inspirations, she’s always coming back to some kind of conceptual language around womanhood, and what that does in the framework of an American art history.”
Unable to travel to Venice until recently, because of the pandemic, Leigh is looking forward to spending time there this spring. “I’m going to have my own water taxi,” she said, laughing. For the past five years, Leigh told me, she has been running to catch up with her career. We were talking on Zoom last month, and she was in a reflective mood. “I feel like I’m moving into a different phase of my life,” she said. “I’m going to slow things down. I could have twenty people working for me and make three times as much work as I make now, but there’s no way I could supervise or have my hand in everything, or have relationships with all those people.”
Her success still surprises her. She now lives in a brownstone in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, a house that is not unlike the one she grew up in. (“I don’t think it would be incorrect to call it a mansion.”) Recently, she acquired a goldendoodle named Margot, whom she adores. I asked her if she ever thought about getting married again. Leigh said no, then reconsidered. “I’m just getting to think about it, now that my daughter is in college and out of the house,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of lovers, but no serious partner.” And then, her confidence resurgent: “I probably will find someone soon.”
When I first met her, Leigh had said, “It looks like I may not suffer the fate of most of my forebears, who have ten years of success and then they’re forgotten.” After a pause, she added, “Maybe that’s not going to happen to me. I feel like I’m in my prime, so far as work is concerned. I’ve had thirty years to make a ton of mistakes. Now I feel ready, and for some reason I’m not intimidated.” ♦