New York Artist Simone Leigh Takes Her First L.A. Solo Show to Hammer Museum

Sandra Miska

Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Simone Leigh has already made her mark on the New York art scene, and now, with her first ever solo show in Los Angeles, she finally brings her unique works to the West Coast. “Hammer Projects: Simone Leigh” is on view at the Hammer Museum Sept. 17–Jan. 8.

On Jan. 7-8, Leigh herself will be at the Hammer as part of the museum’s “In Real Life: Performance” series. She will be conducting performative lectures with Rizvana Bradley, an assistant professor of film and media studies and African-American studies at Yale on both days. Leigh and Bradley will engage in an improvisational exchange about black radical political, literary and artistic traditions, inspired in part by the community outreach work of the Black Panther Party. This event is free to the public.

Leigh, who was born in 1967 in Chicago to Jamaican parents, works in ceramics, sculptures, video and installation. Her pieces often have a social aspect, with a particular focus on feminism and the black female experience. Leigh is also influenced by visual traditions from the Caribbean, American South and Africa, as well as the black diaspora experience. Her Hammer Project features her recent ceramics and a site-specific installation.

Leigh studied at Earlham College in Indiana. In 2014, she created the “Free People’s Medical Clinic,” an installation located in a 1914 brownstone in Brooklyn neighborhood of Bed-Stuy that had been owned by famous African-American doctor Josephine English (1920–2011). Leigh created a walk-in health center with yoga, nutrition and massage sessions, staffed by volunteers dressed as 19th-century nurses. She received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in 2016.

Leigh has exhibited not only throughout New York, and also in as far away as Morocco and South Africa. She currently teaches in the ceramics department at Rhode Island School of Design.

“Hammer Projects: Simone Leigh” at the Hammer Museum on the UCLA campus, Sept. 17–Jan. 8.