Simone Leigh

Photo by Kristine Larsen

Simone Leigh in her studio, Brooklyn, 2008

   November 2008 Introducing

Petra Trenkel

Constantin Brancusi Louise Bourgeois Lee Bontecou Ana Mendieta Marcel Broodthaers Eva Hesse The Second Sex (at Auction, Anyway) Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949–78

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Around the corner from the imposing, white-columned Beaux-Arts building that is the Brooklyn Museum—the centerpiece in an elegant complex including a 19th-century-era park and botanical garden—is the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Check-cashing stores, crammed bodegas, and abandoned lots share space with narrow, vividly painted Jamaican restaurants, indicative of the area’s predominantly Caribbean population. On one of its quiet side streets, situated between the dappled green luxury of Prospect Park and Crown Heights’ sunburned boulevards, is the studio of artist Simone Leigh. The sculptures that fill the airy room actively embrace the jarring disparities of the world outside. Enormous terra-cotta vessels with pendulous appendages brushed in bulletlike glazes sit on the floor; above them stretches a glass-fronted vitrine filled with hundreds of delicate porcelain casts of plantains, which beckon the viewer like outstretched fingers. A restful clay sculpture calls to mind Brancusi’s Head outfitted with a spiky white afro and the tread of a Timberland boot; next to it, a series of mica-encrusted toilet plungers allude to the infamous police brutality visited on local resident Abner Louima in the late ’90s, an event that sparked marches and riots. Such works synthesize “primitivist” African pottery techniques, the modernist artmaking strategies that took so much from them, and the pan-Africanist politics that critique that very lineage. As Leigh, who turned 40 this year, explains, “My work is often about this idea of a corrupt education. I learned how to make an ‘African pot’ using 19th-century colonial texts. Which is kind of cool. What am I making anyway?”

It’s a good question. Coming across Leigh’s commanding ceramic sculptures in two Chelsea group shows this past summer, I was struck by their effortless embodiment of opposing narratives. Their curvaceous forms and glittery glazes were both fertile and militaristic, organic and industrial, utterly contemporary and mysteriously artifactlike. Queen Bee (2007), a chandelier of voluptuous, grenade-shaped forms sprouting TV antennae, conjured the bulbous, feminine contours favored by Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois as well as Lee Bontecou’s futuristic, sinister sculptures. A wall piece of cast plantains in a zippered plastic vitrine (a dry-cleaning bag fancifully reimagined) recalled Marcel Broodthaers’s ineffable pairing of institutional critique and poetic vernacular products in works like Panneau de moules. Leigh, Chicago-born and of Jamaican parentage, has been making these ceramic works for the past 10 years. They evoke both the black female body and the multifarious cultural and political histories that have laid claim to it. They also variously call on African pottery, performance art, feminism, modernist abstraction, and postminimalist sculpture. But it is the artist’s cribbing from colonial-era anthropology and contemporary pan-Africanism that is her most notable conflation. “I feel as inspired by the attempt to be scientific, that anthropological approach to objects,” she concedes, “as I am by the materials, the surfaces, and the gestures of the objects themselves.”

It was during an internship at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, that Leigh became entranced by African ceramics, the 19th-century texts that attempted to explain them, and museological strategies. “These objects have this long narrative, and then they arrive with a complete lack of authorship. Yet they’re supposed to have this incredible importance for modernism,” she explains, nodding to the fact that she learned about “primitive” objects via their relation to the Western canon. “It was so impossible to figure out what my inheritance was.” Smiling, she adds, “It’s just a great narrative for me to think about.” Behind this cultural transposition, however, are the objects themselves. “African pots are often explained as primitive objects made by primitive people who don’t have the ability to think conceptually,” she says, “but it took me a long time to acquire the skills to create what I wanted to make.” While in school, Leigh taught herself to make African pots by reading books like Nigerian Pottery. She began to see a performative aspect to the making of her round-bottomed terra-cotta vessels, which are each built up—as pinch pots—laboriously by hand.