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# Addressing and Redressing History in Simone Leigh's Sculptures

Myrto Charvalia

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Myrto Charvalia. Addressing and Redressing History in Simone Leigh's Sculptures. Angles: French Perspectives on the Anglophone World, 2025, Re-Narrating Black History in Contemporary Visual Arts, 20, 10.4000/159os. hal-05400259

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# Re-Narrating Black History in Contemporary Visual Arts

Clémentine Tholas, Antonia Rigaud and Anne-Claire Faucquez (dir.)

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URL: https://journals.openedition.org/angles/8954

DOI: 10.4000/159p5

ISSN: 2274-2042

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Clémentine Tholas, Antonia Rigaud and Anne-Claire Faucquez (dir.), *Angles*, 20 | 2025, "Re-Narrating Black History in Contemporary Visual Arts" [Online], Online since 01 December 2025, connection on 03 December 2025. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/angles/8954; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/159p5

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# Addressing and Redressing History
in Simone Leigh's Sculptures

Myrto Charvalia

*This article would not have been possible without the encouragement and invaluable feedback that I received from Clémentine Tholas, Antonia Rigaud (Sorbonne Nouvelle University), Anne-Claire Faulcquez (Paris 8 University) and the anonymous reviewers. Special thanks go to Prof. Amber Musser (CUNY) for her helpful suggestions.*

## Introduction

1

It was after Simone Leigh won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2018 and participated in the Whitney Biennial that she gained momentum in the American art scene. Once she represented the United States pavilion in the Venice Art Biennale in 2022, her work acquired global acclaim. Prior to that, her art was often misunderstood. Initially overlooked, her story of success seems to align with that of David Hammons and Adrian Piper, whose work went unnoticed before winning the attention of the mainstream American art scene, as Copeland explains (2013: 5). Yet Leigh's gradual recognition might be related to her medium of choice, which is more commonly associated with craft than sculpture. Her use of clay and her thematic palette both inform the way she sees and the way her artwork is perceived. Together, they offer new forms of positionality and interaction that are symbiotic with Campt's proposition of "a Black gaze" (2021: 18). Springing from bell hooks' oppositional and interrogating gaze, Campt propounds something that surpasses perspective: a multiplicity of gazes, an active gaze that teases the spectator, refuses full grasping, and reiterates the conversation; in other words, the power of a Black gaze lies in causing discomfort, eliminating explicitness and proposing deviant understandings of spectatorship (2021: 8, 39).

2

Leigh was born in Chicago in 1967, but she now lives in New York City. Her parents were Jamaican immigrants who moved to Chicago. Her upbringing in the art-saturated city played a role, as she later admits, in her eventual involvement with ceramics. Her father was a Nazarene pastor, and the home education Leigh received was quite strict,
but it was her mingling with students from diverse social and cultural backgrounds at school and her frequenting the Chicagoan art museums that shaped her artistic expression. As a young woman, she was introduced to ceramics while studying philosophy at Earlham College in Indiana. She was particularly drawn to the writings of Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, as well as the philosophical texts of the key figures of French feminism, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. Her studies brought her even closer to her subject matter: Black female subjectivity. Her Jamaican origins and the occasional trips to her parents' homeland pushed Leigh to think about how colonialism could be used to counteract social values and understandings of beauty regarding Black women, according to Siddhartha Mitter (2022: 13).

3

Focusing mainly on her ceramic and bronze sculptures, this article explores ways in which Leigh's work can be brought closer to Campt's notion of a Black gaze. Structurally, attention will at first be paid to ceramics and the particularities of this medium before venturing into the rest of Leigh's toolkit, namely, her creative use of archival material that informs her art. As I will show in the first part, Leigh's choice of clay is not arbitrary; instead, it reflects on the ongoing debate around the distinction and limits of art and craft. Although her work is quite expansive¹ and many exhibitions have been organized in recent years, which explore her artistic praxis from various vantage points, my primary focus will be on the work exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Massachusetts, in the summer of 2023. The exhibition spanned nine rooms with about thirty works representative both of her earlier creative practice, from as early as 2004, as well as more recent projects. Chief curator, Eva Respini, drew special attention to Leigh's works that revisit the legacy of slavery and colonialism as well as their dehumanizing effect on the enslaved female body. Ultimately, in this paper I wish to show how Simone Leigh manages to performatively “re-narrate” history through sculpture.

## Glazed and Unglazed Curiosities: Simone Leigh's Creative Praxis and Tools

4

Sometimes, in the process of experimentation, simple gestures can transform not only the piece of art but the entire creative practice in which an artist engages. This could be said of Simone Leigh's work, where the addition of a handle on a female form wearing a skirt transformed the piece into one of her signature sculptures. “I was working with the skirt form and I added a handle, and it just transformed the piece,” she mentioned in a video about her work (Artist Profile 2019), as she was describing how the evolution of her ceramic and bronze female figures, reminiscent of jugs, water jars, or teapots, took place. Participating in the ongoing conversation around the legacy of enslavement, Leigh tends to shed light on neglected aspects of it. Her artistic choices intellectually echo Saidiya Hartman's undertakings in her influential book *Scenes of Subjection* (1997), where she analyzed “quotidian” and often ignored and banalized instances of subjection rather than deliberate acts of violence that have been commonly associated with slavery.

5

However, before discussing the themes of her work, it is important to emphasize Leigh's choice of medium, which has probably contributed to the belated recognition of her work. When she began her career in ceramics, her artworks were quite small. After interviewing the artist in Venice, Siddhartha Mitter remarked humorously that “as her
sculpture has grown, so has her enterprise” (2022: 13). He specifies that her art studio in Brooklyn is quite spacious, that productivity is ensured thanks to her five assistants, and that she owns an “impressive range of kilns.” (2022: 13) The journalist draws on Leigh’s ascendance in the art scene in relation to the gradual scale-enlargement of her work; nevertheless, he fails to relate the aforementioned “ameliorations” to the inevitable reality of ceramics. It could be argued that the more space an artist has, the greater their working scale becomes; this statement is undoubtedly true for many artistic media, like sculpture, painting, and engraving. In ceramics, however, a larger studio serves mainly practical issues rather than ascertaining an artist’s public acclaim. For instance, in order to fire a piece bigger than a few centimeters, the artist must have access to a kiln bigger than the size of the piece; if the artist needs to fire a sculpture a few feet tall, then a kiln the size of a small room is needed.

In terms of scale, the evolution in Leigh’s work could also be explained by her decision to produce exclusively sculptural pieces. It should be noted that ceramics are almost always associated with decorative and/or utilitarian pieces: plates, cups, rustic teapots, and marmites, very often embellished with intricate arabesques. As a conceptual artist, Simone Leigh started to create sculptures that reverse or critique the functionality of ceramics, but even so, her contradictory choice was often misunderstood and her work unacknowledged. In 2011, she created a series of sculptures inspired by ceramic objects of everyday use that she exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and a year later at The Kitchen art gallery. Before that, however, Leigh had made a series of objects simply for their beauty as objects. As she explains in an interview: “I was always a conceptual artist but people would be very distracted by the object-making. It didn’t make sense to them that I was making the pot because of the idea of the pot.” (Mitter 2022: 13)

Arguably, ceramics has an “unstable status” that dates back to the integration of fine art as a category of European cultural production during the Italian Renaissance (Miller 2023: 107). Due to its association with utilitarian purposes and with the manipulation of “brute matter” by brute hands, it was for long considered an applied rather than refined art form (107). Nowadays, utilitarian “crafts”, such as embroidery and knitting, have reclaimed their place among the arts, although they might still be skeptically received by critics and seen as niche, overly decorative, and traditionally feminine. Considering the above, Leigh’s choice becomes almost political as it challenges the conventional definition of art, seeking to shake off the “pejorative associations around decoration, craft, the domestic, and utility,” as Eva Respini suggests (2023: 19). For the sculptor, ceramics presents a field of possibilities, exploiting the plasticity of clay but also the almost magical qualities of oxides, clay and the high temperature of the kiln. Her approach to this traditionally artisanal tool qualifies her work as a dismantling of the current state of fine arts. It should also be highlighted that it “destabilize[s] classifications, histories and notions of modernity, as fixed by those who are outside of her primary references.” (Respini 2023: 19) In a sense, her controversial choice is in line with a general tendency to deconstruct previous hegemonic biases around art. To relate this effort to the wider sphere of curatorial trends and the recent surge of interest in ceramics, similar issues have informed major recent exhibitions. Such examples are: “The Flames: The Age of Ceramics” (Les Flammes: L’Âge de la céramique) that took place at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and ran from October 15, 2021 to February 6, 2022. The exhibition explored how pottery was used in ancient times in diverse geographical areas, and how it has evolved from a utilitarian to a legitimate artistic medium. Or even “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South
Carolina,” which opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY in September 2022 and ran until February 2023 (co-curated by Adrienne Spinozzi, Ethan Lasser and Jason Young). Focusing on Old Edgefield in South Carolina, the exhibition showed how the production of ceramics in the area, during slavery, could alter our perception of American art and elucidate the overwhelming power that art has even when practiced under circumstances of coercion.

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1: Jar with Dave's signature, 1858</figcaption></figure>

Detail of a storage jar with David “Dave” Drake’s (ca. 1801-1870s) signature on it. Stony Bluff Manufactory, Old Edgefield District (Trenton), South Carolina, 1858.

Photograph taken by the author in March 2025 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.

8 The Edgefield area was fundamental to the production of stoneware in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; however, because of the enslaved status of most of the craftsmen, not many of their names have survived, with the exception of “Dave the Potter”, David Drake, an enslaved poet and potter who signed many of his creations (Figure 1). His signature reveals more than just the creative credit for his pots; as the curators mention in the visual tour of the exhibition, his signature was a statement of disobedience against laws that forbade enslaved people to read or write (“Hear Me Now” 2022).

9 Aside from the water coolers and other large functional vessels found, one of the most enigmatic artifacts of the area is the Edgefield face jugs (Figure 2). Despite the lack of crucial details surrounding how the face jugs were created, they nevertheless constitute poignant symbols of resistance and the perseverance of an African cultural heritage.
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2: Unknown. *Edgefield Face Jug*. ca. 1867-85.</figcaption></figure>

Stoneware face jug created by unrecorded Edgefield District potter attributed to the American manufacturer, Miles Mill Pottery, ca. 1867-85.

Photograph taken by the author in March 2025 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.

10 The Edgefield face jugs were probably inspired by African burial rituals that travelled through the Middle Passage to South Carolina. Considering that enslaved Africans continued to be brought to the Americas even after the slave trade was banned in 1808 renders the connection between these peculiar jugs and the African aesthetics and pottery practices of West Africa quite evident. It is speculated that the jugs were created either before or after the enslaved potters’ daily toil for their own use. Although most of the makers’ names cannot be retrieved, their practice offers another angle on the history of enslavement, where their African origins remain subversively present, ruling out the idea of complete cultural obliteration. Moreover, this exclusively African American pottery production gestures toward a redefinition of American art *per se* and provides evidence of the deep roots of the African diaspora in cultural history. Edgefield face jugs are one of Leigh’s main sources of inspiration; the artist’s aesthetic approach of them offers glimpses of similar underrepresented instances of the past.

11 On a more technical note, with regards to clay, Leigh has chosen to work with durable stoneware, proof that Leigh sees beyond the fragility and domestic span of clay by producing robust and imposing stoneware pieces (Respini 2023: 20). The process of manipulating clay, letting it dry, and firing it adds even more to the “magical” quality of ceramics. In fact, the very consistency of clay tells a story; as Agard-Jones asserts: “Clay – differentiated by its unique mix of minerals, including illite, kaolinite, chlorite, sepiolite, smectite, and bentonite – offers a map of its own making.” (2023: 105) The extreme changes and chemical reactions that take place once the ceramic piece is
transferred into the kiln, reaching temperatures as high as 1200°C, transform the piece further. Christina Sharpe mentions how “the kiln creates an environment in which objects are changed by what they’re adjacent to and what residue might be lingering there.” (2023: 231) It is no wonder that Amber Musser calls the kiln “atmospheric,” as it dictates the final piece’s mood, texture, and color (2025). Depending on whether a piece is glazed, which renders it impermeable, or not, the potter must fire it once or twice. Should an iridescent or golden patina be added to the glazed object, then a third firing is necessary. Although this is practical information that does not necessarily coincide with Leigh’s artistic endeavors, a second or even third firing offers a very different temporal identity to the end result, a constant reminder that ceramics is a celebration of the creator’s hands and a slow art that needs endless hours of devotion.

12

Inside the “atmospheric” kiln, the effects of glazing are often so surprising to the point of challenging the viewer’s senses, inspiring appetite. Describing the glazed statue of *Althea*, Hortense Spillers notices how the high concentration of cobalt oxide makes the glaze look edible: “The cobalt and India ink, against porcelain and terracotta, burst on the tongue of the sight, if we might so describe it, with an appetitive poignance and tactility that are nearly edible!” (2023: 244) A similar glistening blue sculpture that chimes with Spillers’ statement is *Martinique* (Figure 3). Overall, the relativity of the beautiful and the deadly (most oxides are toxic) converges in ceramics, recalling Derrida’s elaboration of the “pharmakon”² (Derrida 1972: 120-22). Could this not be true of Leigh’s mesmerizing sculptures, “deliciously” shimmering and yet depicting how Black female subjectivity has historically been shackled, destroyed, demonized, and compulsively violated?

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 3: Simone Leigh. Martinique, 2022.**</figcaption></figure>

Photograph taken by the author in July 2023 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (Simone Leigh, April 6 – September 4, 2023).
13 Focusing on the chemical and highly practical aspects of pottery is essential to understanding Leigh’s practice. For instance, the process of creating a 7-meter-high sculpture like *Satellite* (2022) out of this earthy and unstable material, before casting it into bronze, becomes a challenging project, close to an impossible act.

14 Impossibility permeates Leigh’s artistic practice, as she shifts the familiar terrain of ceramics and elevates it to a monumental scale. It complements the artist’s thematic matter, too; through her art, Leigh often tries to revisit the after-effects of slavery and the subjection the enslaved body was forced to experience. The artist’s deviant use of objects, such as the form of a jug for the body or torso of a sculpture, seems to cling to notions of objectification and fetishization of the Black body; the implicit allusion to these, through her repetitive motif of “vessels-as-bodies”, as well as the reference to Edgefield “face jugs”, delineates the unfathomable character of these conditions. Ultimately, the technical challenges of ceramics and the incorporation of functional items in her practice contribute to the conceptual dimension of Leigh’s work by both confronting and reevaluating violent histories.

## The archive once more: Reflections on the afterlife of slavery through Simone Leigh’s work

15 The violent institution of enslavement has left an indelible mark on the history of the United States and continues to haunt the social fabric. Far from being evanescent, its subversive presence aligns with Simone Leigh’s equally subversive way of revisiting its legacy. Throughout her career, Leigh has explored archetypal instances of slavery, such as the “mammy”. In her solo exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center titled “Gone South,” she creatively reflected on a “particular architectural oddity” of the American South (Gaines 2014). She revisited a pancake house in Mississippi whose dining area is shaped like a stereotypical mammy’s puffy dress. The top of the building depicts her upper body and face, which is painted in an almost blackface manner³ (Figure 4). Leigh’s reconsideration of slavery in the South aims at showing how it shaped the objectifying lens through which Black women were represented until recently.
<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>Figure 4: Mammy's Cupboard Restaurant, Natchez, Mississippi</figcaption></figure>

Highsmith, Carol, M. ca. 1980, Carol M. Highsmith Archive. https://www.loc.gov/item/2011631465/

16 Docile, unassuming, a great cook and a cleaner, the figure of the “mammy” holds a prevalent position in Old South nostalgia; she encompasses a romanticized version of domestic toiling and is a commodified figure – the perfect “utensil” for the household. This image still haunts commercial imagery. The Aunt Jemima American breakfast brand, was (and continues to be) a commercial success entirely based on a male antebellum fantasy; as Manring explains: “Aunt Jemima, who never existed, had become a real person through the imagination of the men who manipulated her image.” (1995: 33) Inspired by the long dress that hides the stereotypically corpulent figure of the “mammy”, Leigh produced a series of sculptures reminiscent of it. The characteristic puffiness of the dress adds another temporal layer to her sculpture as it might be a reference to the bouffant attire of *Las Meninas* (1656) by Diego Velázquez; it offers a diachronic quality to her sculptures.

17 It should be noted that very often the female figure that Leigh creates does not have eyes or ears. This absence is deliberate, asserting their forced silencing in the past, but it could also be read as a voluntarily averted eye and disinterested ear, reclaiming their freedom *not* to hear, *not* to see, *not* to pay attention. As Helen Molesworth has written, “Her figures are not giving up their secrets. [...] They cannot be occupied, colonized, coopted or subjugated.” (quoted in Greenberger 2020) They are unavailable and freely disinterested, enclosed, qualities that hint at their radical inscrutability. The artist’s uniqueness lies exactly in this: the controversial use of a very “crafty” medium of expression with a conceptual methodological approach. Leigh’s revisiting of slavery becomes a critical act against the chronically white gaze, a living example of Campt’s elaboration of a Black gaze. In her book, Campt draws on Arthur Jafa, who collects videos and images from social media and then uses them in his work creating archival
collages; in a way, those amateur digital artefacts constitute an “everyday archive of Black precarity” (2021: 5) through which Black art sprouts. In an analogous way, Leigh drew on postcards—a amusing kind of photograph produced to serve as affordable and easily transportable memorabilia.

18

As Murray Whyte explains, the photograph titled *The Wilde Woman of Aiken* (Figure 5) taken in 1882 by James A. Palmer, a southern white photographer who made stereo images, “was intended as cruelty.” (2023: G5) The picture is kept in storage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan together with *An Aesthetic Darkey*, from the same series, that depicts a solemn Black boy with his palms raised and crossed in a pensive mood; his elbows rest on a table decorated with a vase containing a sunflower and an Edgefield face jug. The photograph of the *Wilde Woman* depicts a beautiful Black woman wearing a long dress and solemnly standing next to the same decoration. Her look is contemplative and quite melancholic, yet the description tells another story: she is a “Wilde woman,” a characterization that transforms her into a barbaric figure close or equivalent to the “noble savage.”⁴ Palmer’s racist souvenir image has an unexpected ancestor – the “e” in “Wilde” betrays this reference. The photographer was inspired by an unsettling image that figured on the cover of a January 1882 issue of *Harper’s Weekly: Journal of Civilization*. The caricatured engraving *An Aesthetic Monkey* was probably a satirical press representation of Oscar Wilde during his lecture tour of the United States and Canada – a visit that had negatively galvanized many people at that time. The engraving shows a pensive and anthropomorphic monkey at his desk, contemplating or about to write; his pen is replaced by a lily; a cylindrical vase with a sunflower is positioned on the opposite side of the monkey. Hence, Leigh’s revisiting Palmer’s photograph acquires a palimpsestic nature; it highlights the recurring degradation of anything unconventional or unheard of into a monstrous condition (“othering”).
<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5: Palmer James, *The Wilde Woman of Aiken*, 1882</figcaption></figure>

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/814626.

19 The photograph alone perpetuates a double-layered story of violence; it encapsulates what is at stake in the problematization of the white gaze. But it is the very status of the photograph as an archival material that further accentuates its problematic nature. Derrida's theorization of the archive as “archonticon” sheds light on the archive as a predicament. Derrida uses the Greek word for archive, “arkheion”, which etymologically hints both at the ultimate beginning and the ultimate authority, in order to underline its ambivalent nature: it is both powerful and obliterating (1995: 2). The archive records and safeguards instances of the past, a quality that constitutes its power, but simultaneously casts a veil over many other elements, events, people, hence its obliterating structure. To apply this to Palmer's *Wilde Woman*, the photograph gives access to an instant of the past, offering a glimpse of this woman's subjection and “savagification,” as its title suggests. Nevertheless, the archival status of the photograph carries a story about the Black model without *truly* carrying it – her actual story and name are concealed.

20 Simone Leigh is fairly aware of the archival proliferation of savagery instead of history. In fact, the mending of this vast historical flaw is central to her work. In *Anonymous* (2022) and *Jug* (2022), the sculptor revisits the curious, colonial keepsake and tries to mend the violent effect of its archival ancestor. Her *Anonymous* is a human-size glazed stoneware sculpture of the woman in Palmer's photograph. Her overall posture is similar, but her eyes are closed, and her dress is magnified, which hauntingly alludes to Velásquez's *Las Meninas* once again. Instead of the prescriptive backdrop that Palmer had chosen, Leigh places one of her sculptures, *Jug* (2022), facing *Anonymous* (Figure 6), a choice that alters their dynamics. *Jug* is a meter-long ceramic sculpture of a recipient, covered with a glistening white glaze. Leigh has replaced the human face of the
Edgefield face jug with numerous cowries whose slits are reminiscent of mouths or other bodily orifices, like the vagina. In this way, not only does Leigh revisit her praised Edgefield pottery, she also provides a statement. Cowries were used as a currency in West Africa and areas involved in slave trade. Their form, however, is also reminiscent of female sexual organs. Leigh uses this loaded and ambivalent image as a decoration for her revisited face jug that faces *Anonymous*.

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>Figure 6: Simone Leigh, *Anonymous* (detail), 2022</figcaption></figure>

Photograph taken by the author in July 2023 at ICA, Boston (Simone Leigh, April 6 – September 4, 2023).

21 Struck by Palmer’s “Aiken and Vicinity series” (1882), the creation of *Anonymous* was a decisive and painful process for the Chicagoan sculptor: “I was uncomfortable with seeing this tableau being built in the studio over time,” she says in her interview with Mitter (2022: 13). This is the reason she came up with the idea of meaningfully destroying the sculpture. When she finished the first draft of *Anonymous* using papier-mâché and raffia, she decided to use the sculpture in a performance on the Red Hook waterfront in Brooklyn where she set it on fire. Her videotaped performance was inspired by the carnivalesque image of Vaval’s cremation in Martinique and became the center of attention of her short artistic film *Conspiracy* (Mitter 2022: 13). Setting fire to her work adds a performative layer to Leigh’s praxis, carrying a powerful, corporeal message, and is an attempt to expurgate the harm induced by the staged photo-series.

22 Palmer's photograph is by far not the only instance of the dehumanization or belittlement of Black women. One of the most melancholic and cruel stories of racism and colonial exploitation of the female body is Sarah Baartman's. The Khoisan woman was taken away from her African community and brought to Europe as a monstrous, sexualized curiosity because of her *steatopygia*. For years, Baartman was dragged from
one freakshow to another and was forced to prostitute herself. After her death, her body remained a curiosity; deemed an unprecedented “specimen” her body was dissected and exhibited in the Musée de l’homme – a violent reality that chimes with antiblackness in scientific research at that time. In 2002, her remains were sent back to South Africa, but her horrendous story continues to haunt. As Ayo Coly suggests, her past is still spectrally present, bound to perpetuate the story of the Black female body’s sexualization, which validates Derrida’s hauntology – his idea that in order to “learn to live” we need to learn to live with the ghosts of the past (Coly 2019: 2; Derrida 1994: 15).

23

Leigh had used Baartman's story as a blueprint of female body objectification for a series of salt fired stoneware “body-vessels” she had conceptualized in 2006. The artist entitled her series the “Hottentot Venus series,” exemplifying her historical point of reference. The series consists of big vases reminiscent of the “swelling belly” of pregnant women and were covered with many breast-like protruding forms (Agard-Jones 2023: 107). It is as if the breasts – a commonplace for motherhood and femininity – grow out of the recipient; thus, her choice carries a double effect. On the one hand, it is a critical gesture against commodification; on the other hand, it functions as a battle cry against the psychological and somatic annihilation Baartman had to suffer during her life and afterlife, because of her protruding buttocks – an uncommon body feature for the western eye. Leigh's novelty is related to her attempt to soothe or even repair the wounds of the past, and to undo the various hegemonic foundations that were set through the institutions of slavery and colonization.

24

Leigh accesses the past through her art, but not without considering the obstacles of her act of reparation. In fact, one of the most complicated predicaments of revisiting the traumatic past and reviving the voices of the silenced is that, more often than otherwise, the story the archive has recorded is a story of violence.⁵ This predicament has been previously explored by Hortense Spillers, hence her coinage of “pornotroping,” (1987: 67) and by Saidiya Hartman in her books *Scenes of Subjection* (1997), *Lose Your Mother* (2008) and in her edifying “Venus in Two Acts” (2008). In the latter, she explores the obstacles one must face when revisiting enslaved women’s stories. In a way, the archive provides more limitations than access points. Leigh’s approach to Baartman’s story could constitute a “critical fabulation,” as Hartman calls this method of critically and ethically revisiting the past (2008: 11). With her vessels she hints at Baartman’s commodification while leaving the rest to the observer. What is crucial is that the artist proceeds in recreating Baartman’s trauma of over-sexualization without leaving loopholes for any instance of sexualized voyeurism.

## Last Garment (2022) as a Critical Fabulation

25

In many cases, the only evidence left behind is captured in a photograph and to access the silenced, the forgotten, the oppressed, viewers must access the memorial evidence created by the very oppressor. One of the most accurate examples of this is the source material for Leigh’s *Last Garment* (2022), a monumental and aesthetically pleasing bronze installation that I had the opportunity to see at ICA in July 2023 (Figure 7). Through this artwork, Leigh does not only make use of her Jamaican ancestry, but she also offers a reimagining of the colonial past in the Caribbean. The *Last Garment* is a sculptural installation that consists of a large water-filled pool at the center of which stands a statue – first created in clay and then cast in bronze – of a Black woman bent
at the waist, scrubbing clothes on a rock. Her short afro is replaced by miniscule
rosettes. As in many of Leigh's sculptures, her gaze is averted; her attention is focused
only on the clothes and her inaccessible thoughts.

At the Institute of Contemporary Art, the breathtaking effect of the artwork was accentuated through the curator's choice of placing the installation by a large glass window the view of which gave onto the Boston Harbor. There, the reflective effect of the pool's calm water mixed with the greyish-blue sky of Boston and turned the audience's horizon momentarily infinite. Visitors could walk around the installation, observe the woman from many different angles, and see the Boston Harbor facing them and her.

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>Figure 7: Simone Leigh. *Last Garment*, 2022</figcaption></figure>

Photograph taken by the author in July 2023 at ICA, Boston (Simone Leigh, April 6 – September 4, 2023).

Once again, the sculptural installation is the product of a meticulous “extraction of a historical photograph,” as Whyte accurately suggested (2023: G5). The work takes its name from a souvenir photograph of a Jamaican washerwoman taken in 1899 titled *Mammy's Last Garment* (Figure 8).⁶ The photograph was taken by C. H. Graves and is now kept at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In the original postcard, a slender Black washerwoman dressed in white is depicted scrubbing laundry on a rock in a river; her face is raised, but her gaze is focused on the “last garment” of the day. Such postcards were created to promote white tourism in the Caribbean which was colonized by the British; they were provided as “evidence for white tourists of the hygienic habits of the non-white Jamaican population.” (Whyte 2023: G5)
<figure><img src="image_13.png" /><figcaption>Figure 8: C. H. Graves. *Mammy's Last Garment*, 1879</figcaption></figure>

The New York Public Library. Schomburg Institute for Research in Black Culture. Photographs and Prints Division https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5e66b3e8-92cf-d471-e040-e00a180654d7

28 In exploring the colonial past of her parents' island, Leigh encourages the visitors' "responsiveness." (Campt 2021: 18) The *Last Garment* is a fairly figurative work, yet it is specifically this aspect of figuration which renders the installation a "critical fabulation". The artwork perpetuates the image of the Black woman who toils in a colonial background; the figurative representation allows the audience to access the past, to get a taste of her repetitive task, the pain of her bent waist, the coldness of the stream, and her silence, which, accompanied by her averted eyes, becomes the woman's "loophole of retreat."⁷ Notwithstanding the easy access to the scene, arguably offering a voyeuristic kind of liberty to the observer, they soon are confronted with the silence of the woman's quiet world. By blocking full revelation, her furtive look delineates a sense of ocular volition, for her inner world is safely kept private and trespassing-proof. Musser relates the above, as well as the eyelessness of certain sculptures, to a refusal of the external gaze, which emits a "not-your-business effect." (2025) This impenetrability contributes to Leigh's complexification of Black femininity, highlighting the near impossibility of fully representing female interiority.

29 The inscrutability of the washerwoman's story is carefully exploited by Leigh, who provides an aesthetically affectionate image of the woman, without fully fictionalizing her story. She also provides the reality of her condition: bent, working, silent, and immortalized through the colonial lens. Her story is silenced, yet her silence permeates the past and reappears in the present of the exhibition, magnified in a large, commemorative installation. The revival of *Mammy's Last Garment* and its creative transformation into an installation not only conjures the female figure back into the present but amplifies her presence, from the two-dimensional space of the photograph to the all-encompassing three-dimensionality of the installation. An element that encourages Campt's new forms of positionality and a more active interaction with the artwork (2021: 18).

30 Leigh's active shifting in time and space seems to add another layer of meaning to her installation, echoing Françoise Vergès's opening question in her essay *Decolonial Feminism: "Who cleans the world?"* (2021: vi) In the photograph, the hunched woman resurfaces from a colonial Jamaica promoted as clean (she is depicted washing and
wearing starched, immaculately white clothes) and exotically beautiful (dense vegetation surrounds the woman). Her composed image recalls the figure of the “noble savage” surrounded by a land that is still pure, untainted by the exploitation tactics of capitalism. In her elaboration, Vergès underscores how waste has been associated with capitalism and is a sign of it (Magdoff and Williams in Vergès 2021: viii). The current state of neo-liberal capitalism resonates with Leigh’s figurative work, where the waste produced daily is silently cleaned up at night by the invisible descendants of the “mammy” in Graves’ photograph. It might seem like a deductive leap to clearly present Leigh’s *Last Garment* as a direct reference to decolonial feminism. Nevertheless, the silent patience of the figure and her static form frozen in time, depicted as endlessly rubbing other people’s clothes, seem to draw a connecting line between her condition and Vergès’ suggestion that what mainstream feminism does to “correct injustices by equal positions between women and men” is insufficient, if not superficial (2021: 23). “Without questioning the organization of society, economics, or culture,” the profound injustices of capitalism will never be confronted let alone resolved (23). Hence, the *Last Garment*, perceived in the light of neoliberal capitalism and chronic social injustice creatively addresses such issues and establishes a continuation between colonial past and postcolonial present, gesturing toward a decolonial future.

## Conclusion

31

Redressing the “crafty” and utilitarian associations of ceramics, Leigh reintroduces clay, her primary medium of expression, as a durable and worthy-of-consideration material; in turn, the slowness and patience that ceramics demands offers a sense of timelessness to her sculptures. The artist’s extensive use of the archive and its “re-writing” aligns her work with the growing interest in the art of reparation and/or reclamation, as well as with the archival turn. But beyond attempting to heal the wounds of the past, the urgency of her artworks lies in “renew[ing] the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present,” to use Homi Bhabha’s distinction of the “new” in *The Location of Culture* (1994: 10). Indeed, her work transcends conventional temporality, transporting the viewer to a time of “postcolonial and post-plantation possibility.” (Agard-Jones 2023: 105) Leigh not only addresses questions of injustice and omission of Black subjectivity, but she offers endless “what-if” scenarios and possibilities that remain on the horizon albeit unexplored.

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agard-Jones, Vanessa. “Clay’s Memory.” In *Simone Leigh*. Ed. Eva Respini. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2023. 104-5.

Artist Profile: Simone Leigh. 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42NGGIU0HnA
Bhabha, Homi. *The Location of Culture*. London: Routledge, 1994.

Campt, Tina M. *A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See*. Boston: The MIT P., 2021.

Coly, A. Ayo. *Postcolonial Hauntologies: African Women's Discourses of the Female Body*. Lincoln, NE: U. of Nebraska P., 2019.

Copeland, Huey. *Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America*. Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 2013.

Derrida, Jacques. *La dissémination*. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972.

Derrida, Jacques. *Archive Fever: A Freudian Expression*. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1995.

Derrida, Jacques. *Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International*. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1993 1994.

Gaines, Malik. "BOMB Magazine | Simone Leigh." *BOMB Magazine* 127 (Spring), 2014. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/simone-leigh/

Graves, Carlton Harlow. "Mammy's Last Garment, Jamaica, 1899." https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5e66b3e8-92cf-d471-e040-e00a180654d7

Greenberger, Alex. "How Simone Leigh's Sculptures Centering Black Women Brought Her to the Venice Biennale." *ARTnews*. April 19, 2022. https://www.artnews.com/feature/simone-leigh-who-is-she-why-is-she-famous 1234574361/

Hartman, Saidiya. *Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America*. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, [1997] 2022.

Hartman, Saidiya. *Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route*. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [2007] 2008.

Hartman, Saidiya. "Venus in Two Acts." *Small Axe* 12 (2), 2008: 1-14. DOI: 10.1215/-12-2-1

Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina Virtual Opening | Met Exhibitions, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0g3pC4cgu0

Miller, Sequoia. "The Ceramics of Simone Leigh." In *Simone Leigh*. Boston, MA: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2023. 106-11.

Mitter, Siddhartha. "A Time to Share her Inspirations with the World." *The New York Times*. April 17, 2022: 12-13.

Manring, Maurice. "Aunt Jemima Explained: The Old South, the Absent Mistress, and the Slave in the Box." *Southern Cultures* 2 (1), 1995: 19-44. DOI: 10.1353/scu.1995.0059

Musser, Amber (2025, Oct. 10). *Hapticality and the Sphinx: Simone Leigh's Fugitive Sphinxes* [Keynote Address]. Haptic Trouble 2025 Conference, Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, France.

"Noble Savage | Primitivism, Rousseau, Enlightenment | Britannica." https://www.britannica.com/art/noble-savage

Okoro, Enuma. "Artist Simone Leigh: 'My Research Was Fraught with Colonial Framing.'" *Financial Times*. April 14, 2023: 13.

Palmer, James A. "An Aesthetic Darkey" *The Aiken and Vicinity Series*. 1882. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/761731

Palmer, James A. "The Wilde Woman of Aiken," *The Aiken and Vicinity Series*. 1882. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/814626
Respini, Eva, ed. *Simone Leigh*. Boston, MA: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2023.

Respini, Eva. "Introduction: Simone Leigh, Sculpting Time." In *Simone Leigh*. Boston, MA: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2023. 14-31.

Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. "Simone Leigh: 'A Journey to Scale.'" In *Simone Leigh*. Boston, MA: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2023. 230-41.

Spillers, Hortense. "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book." *Diacritics* 17 (2), 1987: 65-81. DOI: 10.2307/464747

Spillers, Hortense. "Simone Leigh and the Monumental." In *Simone Leigh*. Boston, MA: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2023. 242-47.

Vergès, Françoise. *A Decolonial Feminism*. Trans. Ashley J. Bohrer. London: Pluto Press, [2019] 2021.

Whyte, Murray. "At the ICA, a Breathtaking 'Simone Leigh.'" *The Boston Globe*. April 6, 2023. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/04/06/arts/ica breathtaking-simone-leigh/https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/04/06/arts/ica breathtaking-simone-leigh/

## NOTES

1. Leigh's work is expansive in many different ways; she is a prolific artist and she has produced some massive sculptures, such as *Brick House* (2019) or *Satellite* (2022). Leigh's work is also generically diverse. Aside from her ceramic and bronze sculptures, she is also known for her activism, her social sculpture works, as well as her video art and performances. The same diversity is thematically relevant; the artist systematically renews the center of her interest and explores history from very heterogeneous vantage points.

2. Jacques Derrida explains the ambivalence behind the notion of "pharmakon" in his book *Dissemination* (*La Dissémination*, 1972) and more specifically in "Plato's Pharmacy" (*La pharmacie de Platon*) I. 4. "The pharmakon," (Le pharmakon), 118-145. Briefly, his elaboration is based on the ambivalent meaning of the word which stands both for "remedy" and "poison", depending on the portion administered. Derrida explains that Plato often used the word, but depending on the context, the translation of the word varies.

3. The restaurant still operates; but the mammy's complexion has been painted over in a much lighter color.

4. Leigh is quite drawn to the concept of the noble savage, stating that it has been underexplored (Okoro 2023: 13; Mitter 2022: 13). Derived from the opposing dyad of the evil savage and the "noble" savage, the concept has been used in literature, especially during the 18th and 19th centuries, to illustrate an idealized version of the "uncivilized man" presented as tranquil, pure and close to nature (Britannica).

5. To avoid oversimplification, it should be noted that my affirmation is informed by Derrida's elaboration of the archive, which he deems a violent institution, as mentioned earlier.

6. The version included in the paper is a stereograph, which explains the pair of identical photographs. It was intended to be viewed through a stereoscope, which gave a three-dimensional impression to the image.

7. In October 2022, Simone Leigh gathered intellectuals and artists for a project entitled *Loophole of Retreat: Venice*, as part of her exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The title is taken from the eponymous chapter 21 in Harriet Jacobs' autobiography *Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl* (1861). Following her escape, Harriet hides in a cramped, pitch-black, and rat-infested garret that she calls her "loophole of retreat." Through a tiny crack she can see the world outside, but no one can see her.
## ABSTRACTS

In her multifaceted work, Simone Leigh (b. 1967, Chicago) explores the history of the African diaspora, examining topics such as the elusive legacy of enslavement, the indelible effects of colonialism and the forced migration of Black people. In this article, I focus primarily on her ceramic and bronze work which I read as a reimagined genealogy of Black subjectivity. In regards to her approach, Leigh addresses history and exposes quotidian, therefore banalized, “scenes of subjection,” to echo Saidiya Hartman’s eponymous book. After delving into the controversy surrounding her main medium of expression, ceramics, I emphasize in this article the use of the archive both as a source of inspiration and a way to redress history. I also provide an analysis of her installation *Last Garment* (2022) as a therapeutic showcase or a “critical fabulation.”

Le travail riche de Simone Leigh (née en 1967 à Chicago) évoque l'histoire de la diaspora africaine, examinant des sujets tels que l'héritage de la traite négrière, les effets du colonialisme et de la migration forcée, en les saisissant dans une glaise aux contours scintillants : ainsi l'artiste modèle dans le grès émaillé des formes féminines et des objets commémoratifs revisités. En explorant leur matérialité, Leigh révèle des « scènes d'assujettissement » (pour faire écho au livre éponyme de Saidiya Hartman) qui sont quotidiennes, et donc banalisées. Cet article s'intéresse à son principal outil d'expression, la céramique, et à la controverse qui a entouré son utilisation, ainsi qu'à la manière dont Leigh se sert de l'archive comme source d'inspiration. Son installation *Last Garment* (2022) est ici présentée comme une « fabulation critique » qui met en valeur les qualités thérapeutiques de l'art face aux omissions de l'histoire.

## INDEX

**Keywords:** Simone Leigh, archive, sculpture, ceramics, reparations, history, enslavement, Middle
Passage

**Mots-clés:** Simone Leigh, archive, sculpture, céramique, réparations, histoire, esclavage, Passage
du milieu

## AUTHOR

MYRTO CHARVALIA

Myrto Charvalia is a Teaching Fellow (ATER) at the Social Sciences department of Paris Nanterre University and a PhD student, working under the supervision of Prof. Françoise Král (CREA). Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the representations of haunting in the works of Toni Morrison, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jesmyn Ward and Toni Cade Bambara. Her research interests include black arts, trauma studies, memory studies, and the rewriting of mythology in contemporary literature.

m.charvalia@parisnanterre.fr