Simone Leigh

Simone Leigh is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Leigh’s work has been exhibited nationally at venues including Rush Arts gallery, Momenta Art, The Painted Bride, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning and The Chicago Cultural Center. She has been awarded residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, School of Visual Arts, Henry Street Settlement, Greenwich House Pottery and Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts. Her work has been reviewed widely including in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Trace Magazine, Artnet, NY 1 News, New York Blade and Flavorpill.

“If the camera serves as an element of distancing, ceramics in the hands of Simone Leigh might do the opposite…. One aspect of Leigh’s work is an interest in querying what she views as excessively defensive Afro-centric ideals of femininity…. By co-opting racist reductionism Leigh rehabilitates the memories of historic individuals through a kind of purging.

Embracing symbols of bigotry can itself function as an act of defiance as it entails adopting the space of the peripheral. As feminist writer bell hooks clarified, however, one does not “[speak]” of a marginality one wishes to lose, to give up, or surrender as part of moving into the center, but rather as a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist.”

-Akiko Ichikawa

2004-05 Momenta Art catalog