Inside Simone Leigh’s Long-Awaited U.S. Pavilion, Where Black Women Take Center Stage

Leigh’s pavilion looks quite unlike any U.S. Pavilion before it, thanks to the thatch roofing currently on display. That part of the structure, it turns out, is itself an artwork: Façade (all works 2022), which alludes to the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, a show that was controversial, even during its day, for recreating elements of African and Asian societies, then under colonial rule by European counntries, purely as displays for bourgeois audiences. In response, the consciousness-raising Négritude movement was formed by African and Caribbean intellectuals. Viewing the Venice Biennale as being somewhat similar to a world’s fair, Leigh links past and present. At the center of the pavilion lies Satellite.

Rising 24 feet into the air, Satellite is tall enough to walk under. Its form recalls that of a D’mba, a bust of a woman used by the Baga people of West Africa to commune with their ancestors (and later appropriated by European modernists like Picasso for insipiration that had little to do with its initial context). Leigh turns the D’mba form minimal, substituting its angular face for a spoon-like form that has appeared in her work previously.

Inside, viewers encounter Last Garment, its name and form a reference to a similarly named  photograph format, produced in Jamaica by C. H. Graves, that was used to promote the idea of island residents as hardworking, virtuous people to foreigners. As with many of her other sculptures, this one is eyeless and earless, as if to wall itself off from the viewer. In the reflecting pool around this work, viewers can gaze at themselves looking at Leigh’s sculpture.

Like Last Garment, the all-white sculpture at left, Anonymous, is a reference to a 19th-century photograph, this one by James A. Palmer. Palmer’s picture featured a Black woman near a face jug made by a potter in the Edgefield District in South Carolina, where enslaved African Americans often produced these kinds of objects. While that woman’s identity remains unknown, Leigh memorializes her to provide her the proper attention she deserves. Nearby her is Jug (at right), which features large depictions of cowrie shells.

The 16-foot-tall Sentinel is similar to another work by the artist that appeared at the Prospect New Orleans triennial last year in a site where a Robert E. Lee monument once was.

For its head, Sentinel has an arced form that recalls a spoon. It’s a reference to objects produced by Zulu women that is meant to connote beauty and female labor simultaneously.

Leigh’s work has long honored Black women, though it was not until Sharifa, an homage to the writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, that she had formally produced a portrait. Sharifa envisions the writer as a figure who commands the space in which she’s set without being intimidating or overbearing. She places one step forward, suggesting movement that otherwise goes unseen. In the booklet for the show, Rhodes-Pitts is quoted as saying, “At Simone’s direction, my body passed easily from woman to earth, water, fire, air, time.”

Rhodes-Pitts also figures in the film Conspiracy, which Leigh made with Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich. Featuring narration borrowed from a Zora Neale Hurston text, the film includes a segment in whcih Leigh burns a sculpture of a woman wearing a thatch skirt near what appears to be her Brooklyn studio. The artist Lorraine O’Grady is shown stoically looking on at this ritualistic act.

Some of the best work at this pavilion is saved for last, in a gallery that combines three types of imagery to which Leigh has frequently returned in recent years. Martinique (at left) recalls the face jug format also seen in another work in this pavilion.

Cupboard (at back) has a name that recalls Mammy’s Cupboard, a famed diner in Natchez, Mississippi, that transforms a racist depiction of a Black woman’s body into an eatery. In place of that woman’s face, however, is a cowrie shell that feels anthropomorphized. But it is Sphinx (at front) that owns this room, its chilly gaze inviting close looks and prolonged viewing. It recalls the way the artists like Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (who is in Biennale’s main exhibition, curated by Cecilia Alemani) have historically taken up Egyptian subject matter and rendered it contemporary.