Nationality American Name Simone Leigh | ||
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Awards Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, Creative Capital Grantee, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Michael Richards Award, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Artist-in-Residence The Studio Museum in Harlem, NYFA Fellowship, Art Matters Foundation Grant | ||
Creative time summit 2015 knowledge as collective experience simone leigh
Simone Leigh (born 1967) is an American artist from Chicago born to Jamaican parents who works in New York City, United States. She works in various media including sculpture, video installation and social practice. She teaches in the Ceramics Department of the Rhode Island School of Design. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society.
Contents
- Creative time summit 2015 knowledge as collective experience simone leigh
- ancient to future sharifa rhodes pitts simone leigh claire barliant live from the nypl
- Works and critical reception
- The Waiting Room
- Selected exhibitions
- References
ancient to future sharifa rhodes pitts simone leigh claire barliant live from the nypl
Works and critical reception
Leigh has exhibited internationally including: PS1/MoMA; The Walker Art Center, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Hammer Museum, The Kitchen; Tilton Gallery; Contemporary Museum of Art Houston; SculptureCenter; Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna; L’Appartement22 in Rabat, Morocco; the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh; and the AVA Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa. Leigh organized an event with a group of women artists, who performed in "Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter" part of her solo exhibition, "The Waiting Room" at the New Museum in 2016.
Simone Leigh is the creator of the Free People's Medical Clinic a social practice project created with Creative Time in 2014. The installation was located in a 1914 Bed-Stuy brownstone called the Stuyvesant Mansion, previously owned by notable African-American doctor Josephine English (1920–2011). As an homage to this history, Leigh created a walk-in health center with yoga, nutrition and massage sessions, staffed by volunteers in 19th-century nurse uniforms.
Leigh is the recipient of numerous awards, including the The Herb Alpert Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art from A Blade of Grass, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has been written about in many publications, including Art In America, Artforum, Sculpture Magazine, Modern Painters, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Small Axe, and Bomb magazine.
The Waiting Room
"The Waiting Room" was exhibited at the New Museum in New York City from June to September of 2016. This exhibition honors Esmin Elizabeth Green, who died from blood clots after sitting in a waiting room of a Brooklyn hospital for 24 hours, and provides an alternative vision of health care shaped by female, African-American experience. In an interview with the Guardian, Leigh says "obedience is one of the main threats to black women's health" and "what happened to Green is an example of the lack of empathy people have towards the pain of black women". "The Waiting Room" involved public and private care sessions from different traditions of medicine such as herbalism, Durban muthi markets, meditation rooms, movement studios, and other holistic approaches to healthcare. Outside of museum hours this exhibition became "The Waiting Room Underground" providing free, private workshops outside of the public eye, an homage to the healthcare work of the Black Panthers and the United Order of Tents. Additionally this exhibition featured lectures; workshops on self-defense, home economics, and self awareness; Taiko drumming lessons for LGBTQ youth, and summer internships with the museum for teens. This work came after and is related to Leigh's previous project "Free People's Medical Clinic" (2014).