New yorkers visiting the Venice Biennale may recognise Simone Leigh’s “Brick House”. In 2019, as the first work commissioned for the High Line plinth, this monumental bronze bust surveyed Manhattan’s 10th Avenue from above. Three years later, the figure has crossed the Atlantic and greets visitors entering the Arsenale in Venice.
Part woman, part architecture, the figure’s “skirt” evokes a west African dwelling. The face is framed by perfect braids, each one tipped with a cowrie shell. There are no eyes on the statue yet cleverly placed lighting brings a gleam to her eyeless “gaze” and makes this 16-foot (4.9-metre) sculpture serene yet deeply mysterious. A work of astonishing power, it has garnered Ms Leigh a Golden Lion for the best contribution to “The Milk of Dreams”, the Biennale’s central exhibition.
The Golden Lion is a bonus, since Ms Leigh is also representing the United States in Venice, the first black woman to do so. (In a neat parallel, Sonia Boyce, the first black woman to represent Britain at the Biennale, took the Golden Lion for best pavilion.) Ms Leigh has tackled her task as a black feminist. Now in its fourth or fifth generation, black feminist thought is a “very polyglot, complicated thing,” she told Eva Respini, co-commissioner and curator of the American pavilion, when asked about her exhibition’s title, “Sovereignty”, at the opening. “One thing we can all agree on and the real purpose of black feminist thought is our desire to be ourselves and to have control over our own bodies.”
Moments before, Thomas Smitham, a chargé d’affaires at the American embassy in Italy, had read out a letter of congratulations from the president: “Your trailblazing representations will educate and inspire around the world,” said Joe Biden, a reference to the fact that Ms Leigh’s exhibition will tour widely after Venice.
Born in Chicago to Jamaican parents in 1967, Ms Leigh was the youngest child of Nazarene missionaries; her father was a fire-and-brimstone preacher and ultra-strict parent. As a child she struggled with her parents’ belief system; a break with her family was perhaps inevitable. She studied post-structuralist French feminist philosophy and ceramics at Earlham, a Quaker college in Richmond, Indiana, and did not speak to her parents for several years.
Ms Leigh was determined from the start to make sculpture, not utilitarian vessels. She graduated in 1990, but it was not until 2001, when she had her first show at Rush Arts Gallery in Manhattan, that she began to think of herself as an artist. By then she was married and divorced, with a daughter, Zenobia, born in 1996. A consequence of the divorce was that Zenobia spent summers with her father and Ms Leigh seized on the opportunity to travel abroad, to South Africa, Nigeria and Namibia.
Africa is the starting point for understanding Ms Leigh’s approach to the neoclassical American pavilion, which was modelled on Thomas Jefferson’s plantation at Monticello. Both Mark Bradford and Martin Puryear, the pavilion’s featured artists in 2017 and 2019, took Jefferson to task: Mr Puryear created a memorial to Sally Hemings, an African-American slave owned by Jefferson who bore his children. Ms Leigh, meanwhile, expunges the building entirely. Inspired by photographs of the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931, in which France set out to “display” the culture and peoples of its colonies, the artist has used an abundance of thatch to transform it into a West African palace from the 1930s.
On its outdoor terrace stands “Satellite” (pictured top), a 24-foot bronze work that recalls a traditional D’mba headdress used by the Baga peoples of the Guinea coast to communicate with ancestors. Echoing this traditional communication function, Ms Leigh has topped her sculpture with a spoon-like dish. D’mbas were a source of fascination to many modernists, notably Picasso, who owned one.
Inside the pavilion stands “Last Garment” (pictured above), a bronze sculpture depicting a laundress at work. It connects Ms Leigh to her Caribbean roots: the piece is based on a 19th-century photograph shot in Jamaica by C.H. Graves, entitled “Mammy’s Last Garment”. Such stereotypical images were widely used at the time by the British government to market Jamaica as a tropical paradise.
“One thing that’s difficult for black women,” Ms Leigh said at the opening, “is that what has been written about us is often wrong or skewed or distorted.” Her solution? “In order to tell the truth, you need to invent what might be missing from the archive, to collapse time…to formally move things around in a way that reveals something more true than fact.” ■
The Venice Biennale continues until November 27th