LOS ANGELES — Simultaneous exhibitions of a person artist’s work may be onerous to drag off efficiently. The reveals’ conceits may contradict each other, or differing curatorial visions can cloud the artist’s precise intent. Simone Leigh, a touring exhibition on view concurrently on the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork (LACMA) and the California African American Museum (CAAM), makes it work.
The excellent and thought-provoking exhibition spans almost 20 years and consists of work from Leigh’s 2022 Venice Biennale presentation. Its synchronized presence in two distinct establishments — one which honors the Black American story and one, situated close to glitzy Beverly Hills, that presents top-tier up to date artwork to Los Angeles — brings into focus the notions that Leigh’s work purposefully butts up in opposition to. By presenting a cohesive exhibition cut up into two otherwise coded areas, it demonstrates the futility and ignorance in prescribing a definitive function to the Black female in a postcolonial world. Sure, that is Black artwork. Sure, it’s targeted on the Black femme. Sure, it delves into the roots of a far-flung diaspora. Sure, it’s distinctly American. And sure, it’s for you, even in case you are none of these issues.
Leigh’s work interrogates crucial parts of sculpture by means of her signature use of clay as a medium that highlights the forging of kind. By exaggerating or dulling particular elements of acquainted figures, she attracts consideration to the truth that it’s a creation — not a reality. In a single work at CAAM (“Jug,” 2022), molds constituted of watermelons are used to create stoneware cowrie shells. Cowrie shells had been a extremely valued forex throughout the African continent, whereas watermelon has lengthy been weaponized to degrade the stolen Africans who had been enslaved within the US. In “Jug,” Leigh transforms ridicule to riches, and bridges a chasm between American Black and African Black values.
Her work additionally prods on the relationship between structure and other people. Is structure designed to convey out our creativeness or to include us? After we current ourselves or envision others, we create a scaffolding for notion. However are we doing so in a method that’s supportive or caging? Her sculptures of Black girls are sturdy and stoic, and bigger than life — our bodies as encasings, the Black female as a load-bearing pillar. “Sharifa” (2022), a bronze sculpture almost 10 ft tall and three ft in diameter, stands excessive above viewers with a modestly bowed head. It seems as if nothing however heavy equipment or a pure phenomenon might topple it. But lots of Leigh’s works, together with “Sharifa,” are primarily based on actual folks — different artists — with emotions, objectives, and hardships. It remembers a line from When Rain Clouds Collect, the primary novel by famend South African author Bessie Head: “They had been stricken by the identical ailment — loneliness. But when a grown girl cried, all these scorching tears may soften the iron rod that was her spine.”
The solidity of her sculpted Black girls — bodily weighty and imposing in scale, iron rods and spine — aggrandizes however doesn’t sexualize them. Their curves aren’t lewd, however fairly geometric, foundational, protecting, robust, and infrequently purposeful; that is Leigh’s structure at work. They’re stunning and current and taking on area, however they don’t belong to the viewer. The truth is, their sense of privateness and unknowability awakens a degree of envy in me. Take “Bisi” (2022), a looming armless bust and mannequin-like head whose decrease half resembles the hideaway skirt of the Nutcracker’s Sugar Plum Fairy. Facial traits don’t betray her anonymity, permitting her story to stay her personal. Most of Leigh’s sculptures have obscure options that, to me, eradicate the significance of viewers’ perceptions of them. All of Leigh’s figurative sculptures appear to belong primarily to themselves (even when one might search refuge inside her bell kind), as they problem viewers to query whether or not they can say the identical.
“Conspiracy” (2022) at LACMA, certainly one of three video works within the present (the opposite two are at CAAM), tasks footage of Leigh and her assistants peppered by conceptions of entombment, dying, archeological digs, and anthropological research. Scenes of clay working are juxtaposed with photographs of mummification and unboxing of artifacts and rituals filmed on remote-looking islands. “Breakdown” (2011), a collaboration with artists Liz Magic Laser and Alicia Corridor Moran, might characterize the inside monologue of the artists in “Conspiracy”; the video reveals a Black girl in an ornate theater singing in operatic runs — a Western artwork — and decrying how she should continuously carry out as a way to really feel accepted. The opposite CAAM video work (“my goals, my works should wait until after hell,” 2011), a collaboration between Leigh and Chitra Ganesh below the identify of “Woman,” is so refined that it could possibly be mistaken for a nonetheless. A Black girl lays on her facet and faces away from the viewer, her head disappearing in a pile of rocks. The one proof of motion are the tiny ripples her pores and skin makes from silent however seemingly labored breath. It’s a tormented kind of peace. This sentiment ties all three video installations collectively, and maybe summarizes a few of Leigh’s personal creative journey. It mimics the nervousness and misery that artists expertise when creating one thing distinctive that can inevitably be judged, that might be excavated by strangers to see if it suits inside their parameters of “good.”
Each websites function an outside sculpture, enabling passersby to interact with Leigh’s artwork. I discover one thing poetic about this association. Inside the partitions are works of historic commentary, spectacular in scope and weight. Outdoors rests a single work, free to breathe the air amid the structure of nature, its solitude reworking it from sculpture to monument.
Simone Leigh continues on the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork (5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles) and California African American Museum (600 State Drive, Exposition Park, Los Angeles) by means of January 20, 2025. The exhibition was organized by the Institute of Up to date Artwork/Boston and co-presented in Los Angeles by Taylor Renee Aldridge (CAAM), Naima Keith (LACMA), and Rita Gonzales (LACMA).