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Lot Essay
"In order to tell the truth you need to invest what might be missing from the archive, to collapse time, to concern yourself with issues of scale, to formally move things around in a way that reveals something more true than fact." - Simone Leigh
Simone Leigh’s Meridian (2015) is an electrifying exemplar from the artist’s important clay figural sculpture work. An eyeless face rests upon an elegantly elongated neck, while intricately-wound cobalt ceramic rosettes form a stylized hair coiffed into two bunches. The forms which register as eyes are in fact thumb-sized depressions, articulating the profound presence of Leigh’s hand and emphasizing her labor in creating this work. This is an significant motif in the artist’s oeuvre, as noted by Saidiya Hartman: “Simone Leigh’s hands have created a world, have disrupted and evaded the dominant economy of the gaze, not by opposition or protest, not by explaining anything, but by looking otherwise, by retreating within, by a radical withholding that makes visible and palpable all that is held in reserve” (S. Hartman, “Extended notes on the Riot,” in Simone Leigh, ed. Eva Respini, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2023, p. 33).
Leigh, one of the most prominent contemporary artists working in America, won the Golden Lion for Best Participant at the 59th Venice Biennale. Her practice has embraced a polyphonic vocabulary informed by Black feminist thought and collectivity, plumbing diasporic pasts to construct creolized amalgamations of the diverse histories and geographies of the Black diaspora. Embracing Black feminist ways of looking, making, reading, and being, Leigh’s work is an analytical practice which embodies a forthright insistence on the Black female subjectivity, placing the Black femme form at the center of her practice and maneuvering Black women as her privileged audience.
Clay is the central medium of Leigh’s oeuvre, an ancient, elemental medium which has been used for millennia across cultures. Mastering difficult processes such as atmospheric salt firing, Leigh demonstrates complete control over the medium, bending earth to her will and revealing how ceramic works can emerge out of assumptions of fragility to become fully realized and imposing works. The artist’s mastery over the medium is on full display in Meridian: the highly worked, almost-reflective ceramic surface resembles bronze and provides the work with a sense of fortitude and resilience. Leigh positions the tilting head at an elegant contrapposto, enlivening the sculpture’s composition. The raised chin, recalling Thutmose’s Nefertiti Bust, imbues the work with majesty, while the careful articulation of the porcelain the cobalt porcelain rosettes introduce a contrast in both texture and color, providing for a stimulating viewing experience and operating similarly in effect to the elaborate hairpieces seen the Roman busts of the Flavian era.
Leigh was first exposed to clay sculpture while a summer intern at the Smithsonian Museum of African American Art, where she studied African vessels, particularly the twentieth-century Nigerian pottery of Ladi Kwali. Clay bears a material remembrance, a history embodying an earthly expression of emplacement, analogous to Ana Mendieta’s work with sand from historically meaningful locations in Untitled (Sandwoman Series), 1983-84. Meridian becomes a physical relic of the diasporic pasts Leigh brings forth, embodied with external references both intimate and expansive. Within Meridian, the whole macroscale of African diasporic cultural forms is expressed alongside the microscale of the artist’s own lived experience. Amber Jamilla Musser describes Leigh’s figural structures as “onto-epistemological disruptions” which “allow us to think about the role of materiality as something that exerts its own power, something that requires an orientation that is not about recognition” (A. J. Musser, “Toward Mythic Feminist Theorizing: Simone Leigh and the Power of the Vessel,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 30, no. 3, December 2019, p. 84).
Meridian’s title recalls the character Meridian Hill in Alice Walker’s 1976 meditation on the civil rights movement Meridian. Reading Walker along with Toni Morrison and Gwendolyn Brooks in high school was Leigh’s first introduction to Black feminist thought and the violence of historical archives. In addition to the Golden Lion, the artist, born in Chicago’s South Side to Jamaican missionaries, won the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize in 2018, mounting an accompany solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her presentation Sovereignty at the American Pavilion in 2021 formed the basis for her museum survey, which first opened last year at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and traveled to the Hirshorn Museum in Washington D.C. before ending earlier this year as a joint presentation by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles.
Simone Leigh’s Meridian (2015) is an electrifying exemplar from the artist’s important clay figural sculpture work. An eyeless face rests upon an elegantly elongated neck, while intricately-wound cobalt ceramic rosettes form a stylized hair coiffed into two bunches. The forms which register as eyes are in fact thumb-sized depressions, articulating the profound presence of Leigh’s hand and emphasizing her labor in creating this work. This is an significant motif in the artist’s oeuvre, as noted by Saidiya Hartman: “Simone Leigh’s hands have created a world, have disrupted and evaded the dominant economy of the gaze, not by opposition or protest, not by explaining anything, but by looking otherwise, by retreating within, by a radical withholding that makes visible and palpable all that is held in reserve” (S. Hartman, “Extended notes on the Riot,” in Simone Leigh, ed. Eva Respini, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2023, p. 33).
Leigh, one of the most prominent contemporary artists working in America, won the Golden Lion for Best Participant at the 59th Venice Biennale. Her practice has embraced a polyphonic vocabulary informed by Black feminist thought and collectivity, plumbing diasporic pasts to construct creolized amalgamations of the diverse histories and geographies of the Black diaspora. Embracing Black feminist ways of looking, making, reading, and being, Leigh’s work is an analytical practice which embodies a forthright insistence on the Black female subjectivity, placing the Black femme form at the center of her practice and maneuvering Black women as her privileged audience.
Clay is the central medium of Leigh’s oeuvre, an ancient, elemental medium which has been used for millennia across cultures. Mastering difficult processes such as atmospheric salt firing, Leigh demonstrates complete control over the medium, bending earth to her will and revealing how ceramic works can emerge out of assumptions of fragility to become fully realized and imposing works. The artist’s mastery over the medium is on full display in Meridian: the highly worked, almost-reflective ceramic surface resembles bronze and provides the work with a sense of fortitude and resilience. Leigh positions the tilting head at an elegant contrapposto, enlivening the sculpture’s composition. The raised chin, recalling Thutmose’s Nefertiti Bust, imbues the work with majesty, while the careful articulation of the porcelain the cobalt porcelain rosettes introduce a contrast in both texture and color, providing for a stimulating viewing experience and operating similarly in effect to the elaborate hairpieces seen the Roman busts of the Flavian era.
Leigh was first exposed to clay sculpture while a summer intern at the Smithsonian Museum of African American Art, where she studied African vessels, particularly the twentieth-century Nigerian pottery of Ladi Kwali. Clay bears a material remembrance, a history embodying an earthly expression of emplacement, analogous to Ana Mendieta’s work with sand from historically meaningful locations in Untitled (Sandwoman Series), 1983-84. Meridian becomes a physical relic of the diasporic pasts Leigh brings forth, embodied with external references both intimate and expansive. Within Meridian, the whole macroscale of African diasporic cultural forms is expressed alongside the microscale of the artist’s own lived experience. Amber Jamilla Musser describes Leigh’s figural structures as “onto-epistemological disruptions” which “allow us to think about the role of materiality as something that exerts its own power, something that requires an orientation that is not about recognition” (A. J. Musser, “Toward Mythic Feminist Theorizing: Simone Leigh and the Power of the Vessel,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 30, no. 3, December 2019, p. 84).
Meridian’s title recalls the character Meridian Hill in Alice Walker’s 1976 meditation on the civil rights movement Meridian. Reading Walker along with Toni Morrison and Gwendolyn Brooks in high school was Leigh’s first introduction to Black feminist thought and the violence of historical archives. In addition to the Golden Lion, the artist, born in Chicago’s South Side to Jamaican missionaries, won the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize in 2018, mounting an accompany solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her presentation Sovereignty at the American Pavilion in 2021 formed the basis for her museum survey, which first opened last year at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and traveled to the Hirshorn Museum in Washington D.C. before ending earlier this year as a joint presentation by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles.