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拍品专文
The totemic bronze sculpture Sentinel IV is an immediately recognizable form by one of the most prominent contemporary artists working today. Abstracting the body through her own formal vocabulary, Leigh works in an architectural mode, evidenced by her work’s grand scale and columnar form. The work establishes a graceful black line running from the fused legs up the attenuated neck, ending in the artist’s signature formal device of facelessness, here replacing the expected human head with a vessel-like bowl. Her erasure of the face suggests the historic anonymity and obscurity of Black women in the historical archive while simultaneously providing a form of protection or self-preservation through withholding identity. Describing the series, academic Christina Sharpe writes, “Sentinel reaches backward, stretches forward toward the future, and stands firmly in the present” (C. Sharpe, “Simone Leigh: ‘a journey to scale,’” in Simone Leigh, ed. E. Respini, exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2023, p. 235).
Her practice has embraced a polyphonic vocabulary informed by Black feminist thought and collectivity, mining the past to construct sculptural 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 Black female subjectivity, placing Black femme form at the center of her practice and maneuvering Black women as her privileged audience. The curator Helen Molesworth summates that Leigh’s practice, “in both its sculptural and social-practice formations—is bound up with new ways of thinking about things, new ways of claiming or holding space” (H. Molesworth, “Art is Medicine,” Artforum, 56, no. 7, March 2018, Online).
Leigh utilizes the millennia-old practice of bronze casting from clay scale models, ensuring that every element of the work is carefully controlled by her own hands. Clay has remained a constant element in Leigh’s oeuvre, and she has attained complete control over the medium, bending earth to her will and mastering difficult processes such as atmospheric salt firing. The artist was first exposed to clay sculpture while a summer intern at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., where she studied African vessels. Leigh finds meaning in the material remembrances contained in clay, which embodies an earthly expression of emplacement. Theorist Saidiya Hartman emphasizes the importance of Simone Leigh’s hands-on approach to creating, writing that “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 op. cit., p. 33).
After working mainly in clay for thirty years, Leigh was commissioned by curator Cecilia Alemani to create a monumental bronze sculpture for the High Line in New York, leading to Brick House, her first monumental sculpture. She discovered that she could maintain a continuity between her previous practice and her new commission by first creating a full-scale model of the work in clay before casting in bronze at the Stratton Sculpture Studio in Philadelphia, one of the few foundries able to handle the scale and ambition of her practice. Commenting on her shift in mediums, Leigh notes, “somehow my thirty years of working with clay had made me really good at clay modelling for bronze. I had no idea I would be so comfortable working at that scale” (quoted in C. Tomkins, “The Monumental Success of Simone Leigh,” New Yorker, March 21, 2022, Online). The materiality of Leigh’s work is of great importance, with Amber Jamilla Musser describing 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” (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).
Commenting on her practice, the critic Malik Gaines writes, “Simone Leigh makes historical loops that are felt through material… Leigh’s poetic sensibility at once unveils the beauty of that natural form, its relationship to oceanic trauma, and the radical negativity of its exchange” (M. Gaines, “Simone Leigh,” BOMB Magazine, Spring 2014, Online). Leigh gathers together people, forms and materials into a powerful, concrete totem in Sentinel IV, orienting her production explicitly toward Black women. Citing both African modernist forms as well as traditional African artworks, most notably the Nkisi Power Figures created by the Lupa peoples of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, the immense force of African diasporic cultural forms is expressed alongside the artist’s own lived experience.
Simone Leigh has attained the highest echelons of the contemporary art world, winning the Golden Lion for Best Participant at the 59th Venice Biennale, where a version of her Sentinel bronze was prominently exhibited under the rotunda of the U.S. Pavilion. In addition to the Golden Lion award, the artist, born in Chicago’s South Side to Jamaican missionaries, was the 2010-11 Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum, Harlem. She won the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize in 2018, mounting an accompanying solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her exhibition Sovereignty at the U.S. Pavilion for the Biennale formed the basis for her first survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, which then traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. before ending in Los Angeles as a joint presentation by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the California African American Museum. A larger version of Sentinel graces the atrium of the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C as well as the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A further version is in the collection of Harvard Business School and The University of Texas at Austin holds another example from the same edition. The diffusion of the work across the most important exhibition spaces for sculpture in the United States demonstrates the immense impact which Sentinel has achieved in the cultural zeitgeist.
Her practice has embraced a polyphonic vocabulary informed by Black feminist thought and collectivity, mining the past to construct sculptural 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 Black female subjectivity, placing Black femme form at the center of her practice and maneuvering Black women as her privileged audience. The curator Helen Molesworth summates that Leigh’s practice, “in both its sculptural and social-practice formations—is bound up with new ways of thinking about things, new ways of claiming or holding space” (H. Molesworth, “Art is Medicine,” Artforum, 56, no. 7, March 2018, Online).
Leigh utilizes the millennia-old practice of bronze casting from clay scale models, ensuring that every element of the work is carefully controlled by her own hands. Clay has remained a constant element in Leigh’s oeuvre, and she has attained complete control over the medium, bending earth to her will and mastering difficult processes such as atmospheric salt firing. The artist was first exposed to clay sculpture while a summer intern at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., where she studied African vessels. Leigh finds meaning in the material remembrances contained in clay, which embodies an earthly expression of emplacement. Theorist Saidiya Hartman emphasizes the importance of Simone Leigh’s hands-on approach to creating, writing that “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 op. cit., p. 33).
After working mainly in clay for thirty years, Leigh was commissioned by curator Cecilia Alemani to create a monumental bronze sculpture for the High Line in New York, leading to Brick House, her first monumental sculpture. She discovered that she could maintain a continuity between her previous practice and her new commission by first creating a full-scale model of the work in clay before casting in bronze at the Stratton Sculpture Studio in Philadelphia, one of the few foundries able to handle the scale and ambition of her practice. Commenting on her shift in mediums, Leigh notes, “somehow my thirty years of working with clay had made me really good at clay modelling for bronze. I had no idea I would be so comfortable working at that scale” (quoted in C. Tomkins, “The Monumental Success of Simone Leigh,” New Yorker, March 21, 2022, Online). The materiality of Leigh’s work is of great importance, with Amber Jamilla Musser describing 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” (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).
Commenting on her practice, the critic Malik Gaines writes, “Simone Leigh makes historical loops that are felt through material… Leigh’s poetic sensibility at once unveils the beauty of that natural form, its relationship to oceanic trauma, and the radical negativity of its exchange” (M. Gaines, “Simone Leigh,” BOMB Magazine, Spring 2014, Online). Leigh gathers together people, forms and materials into a powerful, concrete totem in Sentinel IV, orienting her production explicitly toward Black women. Citing both African modernist forms as well as traditional African artworks, most notably the Nkisi Power Figures created by the Lupa peoples of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, the immense force of African diasporic cultural forms is expressed alongside the artist’s own lived experience.
Simone Leigh has attained the highest echelons of the contemporary art world, winning the Golden Lion for Best Participant at the 59th Venice Biennale, where a version of her Sentinel bronze was prominently exhibited under the rotunda of the U.S. Pavilion. In addition to the Golden Lion award, the artist, born in Chicago’s South Side to Jamaican missionaries, was the 2010-11 Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum, Harlem. She won the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize in 2018, mounting an accompanying solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her exhibition Sovereignty at the U.S. Pavilion for the Biennale formed the basis for her first survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, which then traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. before ending in Los Angeles as a joint presentation by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the California African American Museum. A larger version of Sentinel graces the atrium of the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C as well as the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A further version is in the collection of Harvard Business School and The University of Texas at Austin holds another example from the same edition. The diffusion of the work across the most important exhibition spaces for sculpture in the United States demonstrates the immense impact which Sentinel has achieved in the cultural zeitgeist.