Making use of premodern and contemporary sculptural techniques, including lost-wax casting and salt-firing alongside culturally potent forms such as cowrie shells, plantains, raffia, and tobacco leaves, Simone Leigh has developed over the span of two decades a poetic body of sculptures, installations, videos, and works of social practice that centre race, beauty, community, and care as they relate to Black women’s bodies and intellectual labour. When originally presented at the High Line in New York City in 2019, Brick House, a monumental bronze bust of a Black woman whose skirt resembles a clay house, towered, goddess-like, over Manhattan’s busy 10th Avenue. Created as part of Leigh’s Anatomy of Architecture series (2016–present), Brick House – part woman, part house – is one of a group of sculptures that amalgamates bodies with architectural references, from the domed earthen dwellings of the Mousgoum people in Chad and Cameroon, clay-and-wood buildings of the Batammaliba in Togo, and Nigerian ibeji figures to the 19th century African American craft tradition of face jugs and Mammy’s Cupboard, a restaurant in Natchez, Mississippi constructed in the guise of a racist mammy archetype, whose massive red skirt houses the dining room. Alternately registering as a vessel, a dwelling, a space of comfort, and as a site of sanctuary, Brick House powerfully portrays the Black woman’s body as a site of multiplicity.
Madeline Weisburg
