James T. Demetrion Distinguished Artist Series: Simone Leigh
Please note Simone Leigh will be closed to the public on Friday, Feb. 23. Advance registration for the artist’s James T. Demetrion Distinguished Artist Lecture is at capacity. A standby line will open in the lobby at 5 pm on Friday, Feb. 23 to redistribute seats in event of no-shows.
Questions? Email Hirshhornexperience@si.edu
Hirshhorn Insiders, email HMSGdevelopment@si.edu
Artist Simone Leigh is celebrated for a rigorous, multifaceted practice that centers the experiences, care, and labor of Black women. Leigh’s first full-scale survey exhibition is currently on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and is composed of more than twenty years of work in sculpture and video, including works from her seminal presentation as the first Black woman selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, in 2022. For a special one-night-only event, Leigh will sit in conversation with renowned scholar and longtime interlocutor Christina Sharpe. Sharpe is a prolific author, critic, and academic whose works include In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) and Ordinary Notes (2023). Join us as Leigh and Sharpe discuss Leigh’s remarkable practice, its evolution of Black feminist thought, and how it seeks to acknowledge acts of labor and care, particularly among and for Black women.
This annual program is made possible by the Friends of Jim and Barbara Demetrion Endowment Fund, established in 2001 to celebrate Jim Demetrion’s seventeen-year tenure as the Hirshhorn’s second director.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Simone Leigh (b. Chicago, Illinois, 1967) is informed by a disciplined attention to a wide swath of historical periods, geographies, and artistic traditions of Africa and the African diaspora and often combines the female body with domestic vessels or architectural elements to point to unacknowledged acts of labor and care, particularly among and for Black women. Clay forms the basis of most of Leigh’s artworks, including her bronze sculptures, which are first modeled in clay. The artist pushes the medium’s possibilities through scale and method, challenging conventional, hierarchical fine-arts histories, which can still attach to ceramics associations around women’s labor, decoration, domestic crafts, and utility. This exhibition traces the artist’s unique visual language through signature motifs, including cowrie shells, braiding, rosettes, face vessels, and eyeless faces. Through Leigh’s re-performing of these forms in varying materials and scales, new structures of thought and meanings emerge, each consistently centering the experiences and intellectual labor of Black femmes.
Christina Sharpe is a writer, professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is also a senior research associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg. Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010) and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016). Her third book, Ordinary Notes (2023), won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the National Book Awards in Nonfiction. She is currently working on What Could a Vessel Be? (FSG/Knopf, Canada, 2025) and Black. Still. Life. (Duke University Press, 2025). Her writing has appeared in many artist catalogues and journals.
Gallery Experience: Angela Tate on Simone Leigh
FREE
Meet at the information desk in the lobby in advance of a noon start.
Angela Tate, curator of women’s history at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), will lead a special tour exploring Simone Leigh and Black women’s artistic internationalism, meaning the connection between Black women artists and their international representations across the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS GALLERY TALK WAS RESCHEDULED FROM JANUARY 19.
About the Speaker
Angela Tate is curator of women’s history at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Prior to joining the Smithsonian, she worked as curator and public historian in a variety of archives and museums, focused on telling inclusive and expansive stories of the American past. She is a PhD candidate in history at Northwestern University and was educated at California State University, San Bernardino, and Sacramento City College. Her dissertation follows the history of Black women in radio and their involvement in global civil rights movements, with an emphasis on the intersections among celebrity, activism, and feminism. This work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the New York Public Library, and the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute. Her work has appeared in Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture and several upcoming publications. Find more information at www.atpublichistory.com.
About the Exhibition
For over two decades, Simone Leigh has embraced a polyphonic artistic vocabulary that elaborates on Black feminist thought, an intellectual tradition that values and centers the experiences of Black women. Informed by a rigorous attention to a wide swath of historical periods, geographies, and artistic traditions of Africa and the African diaspora, Leigh often combines the female body with domestic vessels or architectural elements to point to unacknowledged acts of labor and care, particularly among and for Black women. For her presentation at the Hirshhorn, the artist has included three new bronze sculptures, Bisi, Herm, and Vessel (2023) in the galleries. Leigh’s monumental bronze Satellite (2022), which stood sentry outside the US Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, has been installed at the southern entrance to the Hirshhorn to signal the exhibition’s arrival.
If you have questions or a request for access services or accommodations that can make your experience more inclusive, please contact hirshhornexperience@si.edu. One to two weeks advance notice is recommended but not required.
Curator’s Tour: Simone Leigh
FREE
Meet at the Information Desk in the Lobby
Hirshhorn curator Anne Reeve will walk visitors through the exhibition Simone Leigh, which highlights work from the artist’s landmark presentation representing the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale alongside key ceramic, bronze, and video works from throughout her career.
About the Exhibition
For over two decades, Leigh has embraced a polyphonic artistic vocabulary that elaborates on Black feminist thought, an intellectual tradition that values and centers the experiences of Black women. Informed by a rigorous attention to a wide swath of historical periods, geographies, and artistic traditions of Africa and the African diaspora, Leigh often combines the female body with domestic vessels or architectural elements to point to unacknowledged acts of labor and care, particularly among and for Black women. For her presentation at the Hirshhorn, the artist has included three new bronze sculptures, Bisi, Herm, and Vessel (2023) in the galleries. Leigh’s monumental bronze Satellite (2022), which stood sentry outside the US Pavilion in Venice, has been installed at the southern entrance to the Hirshhorn to signal the exhibition’s arrival.
If you have questions or a request for access services or accommodations that can make your experience more inclusive, please contact hirshhornexperience@si.edu. One to two weeks advance notice is recommended but not required.