Simone Leigh at LACMA and CAAM
May 26, 2024 - January 20, 2025
Two years ago, Simone Leigh represented the United States in the American Pavillion at the Venice Biennale. Now, Angelenos have the opportunity to see the NY-based artist’s work at two L.A. institutions in a dual exhibition at LACMA and CAAM. Leigh works largely in sculpture, specifically clay and bronze, and her figurative sculptures of black femme figures dominate both exhibitions (joined by a handful of video works). Leigh often blends figuration with a metaphorical abstraction — she uses simplified bell forms to represent a skirt, for instance, or a hallow oval form to suggest a torso. Rosettes, cowrie shells, braids, and vessels populate her symbology.
At LACMA a towering ceramic installation of giant cowrie shells, each uniquely glazed, are adhered around a central cylindrical form, adding a dramatic scale to her world-building. Smaller rosettes often are used to abstract faces or bodies on her pedestal-bound face vessels. Just as Leigh zooms in and out with physical scale, she seems to do so with her conceptual touchpoints which feel both historical and futuristic — dually looking back and towards the future. “In order to tell the truth,” Leigh says, “you need to invent what might be missing from the archive, to collapse time, to concern your self with issues of scale, to formally move things around in a way that reveals something more true that fact.”
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Photo: Installation photograph, Simone Leigh, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, May 26, 2024–January 20, 2025, © Simone Leigh, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA