Simone Leigh Named First Black Woman to Venice Biennale

In October 2020, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) announced that Simone Leigh had been selected to represent the United State at the next Venice Biennale, which, due to Covid, has been postponed until 2022. She is the first Black female artist to be awarded the position, which started in 1930. The American Pavilion spot is incredibly competitive and the winner is selected by the State Department and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). People of different genders and backgrounds have been pretty well represented since then, but no Black women have ever been in the American Pavilion until now. We have discussed race in art before and how representation is critically important for the success and evolution of future artistic opportunities. Leigh’s elevation to Venice is important and something to celebrate, but it is also depressingly late.

The Venice Biennale is “one of the grandest art spaces of all. Hundreds of thousands of people come. That’s not typical for a contemporary art exhibition to have such a diverse, wide audience. It’s really an honor and probably the most visible platform in contemporary art. ¹” The Biennale started in 1893 and the American Pavilion opened in 1930. The Pavilion was previously owned by MoMA and is now owned by the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation, which is responsible for its maintenance and, along with NEA and the State Department, help decide who will be representing the US.

Simone Leigh is known primarily for “increasingly monumental sculptures [that] merge the Black female form with cross-cultural architectural elements to explore questions of identity and cultural prominence.²” She is known for sculptures that depict Black women with architectural features. Many of her pieces show women without eyes or ears; “they are walled off from the viewer—maybe as a protective mechanism, maybe as an act of refusal.³” Leigh presents Black women as integral to society in a way to flip how they are often depicted. She is a prolific and celebrated artist; she won Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum in 2018 and she has been selected for the Whitney Biennale. In her own words, “I came to my artistic practice via the study of philosophy, cultural studies, and a strong interest in African and African American art, which has imbued my object and performance-based work with a concern for the ethnographic, especially the way it records and describes objects.⁴” Black women are her target audience and she does not try to make her art accessible to other groups because Black women “have been left out of the archive or left out of history… I still think there is a lot to mine in terms of figuring out the survival tools these women have used to be so successful, despite being so compromised.⁵” About the Venice Biennale, she said, “I feel like I’m a part of a larger group of artists and thinkers who have reached critical mass. And despite the really horrific climate that we’ve reached, it still doesn’t distract me from the fact of how amazing it is to be a Black artist right now.⁶”

The Simone Leigh appointment to the Venice Biennale is even more special for Boston because the ICA made the announcement. Leigh will exhibit a career retrospective at the museum in 2023 and ICA staff assisted the artist in the application process. It is a real boon for the ICA and for Boston to have some involvement with this historic festival. It’s also an opportunity for the city to continue to right some of the wrongs in terms of race and inclusion in the arts. Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Director, said, “Her figures, especially as she moves into her work in bronze, they’re so massive, they’re so solid and really they demand visibility and power⁷.”

While the selection of Simone Leigh to the Venice Biennial is a triumph, let us not forget the fact that it has taken this long to select a Black woman and that this fact is indicative of a larger imbalance in the arts. As we talked about while discussing the Women Take the Floor exhibit, museum collections have a long way to go in terms of inclusivity, but it is not just the art that needs to be diversified. We discussed the need for curators of color in museums in the article about Philip Guston. It is not just this specific example that proves we need more people of color in museums; “alongside Black artists, Black curators have challenged Eurocentric biases that invalidate Black art.⁸ ” Black artists have suffered from erasure and marginalization and the presence of more curators of color would ensure that that stops. Augusta Savage had to destroy her sculpture Lift Every Voice and Sing after it was exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair because no museum or collector would take it and it was too expensive to travel with her home. The sculpture had been a huge success at the Fair and to have such an ignominious end is criminal.

In 2015, only 4% of curators in American museums were Black. 85% of the art in museum collections is made by white people. Not only does this result in the erasure of Black artists and the dismissal of Black art as ugly and insignificant, the lack of representation means that young people of color may end up feeling discouraged about pursuing a career in the arts, and erasure and dismissal will continue. Museums are facing criticism for race-related issues; the MFA had a controversy last year where staff and volunteers seemed to mock students of color on a tour and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City had staff accuse the leadership of “cultivating a ‘deeply rooted’ culture of racism and white supremacy.⁹ Both museums, along with others across the country, have hired Chief Diversity Officers or, in the case of the MFA, a Senior Director of Belonging and Inclusion. These are important steps, but there is still more to be done.

In addition to the creation of several Diversity Officers and other roles designed at working with different communities and improving internal staff dynamics, there are organizations that are trying to increase the number of people of color in arts leadership. In Nashville, the Nashville Arts Commission started the Racial Equity in Arts Leadership (REAL), which “brings together arts administrators, executive leaders of cultural institutions, community-based arts organizations, and individual artists for regular seminars and organizational workshops that provide insight into how institutional practices such as hiring processes and arts programming choices can advance racial equity in our community.¹⁰” There are other organizations like this across the country. Many are working with city and state governments. This is promising because it means that everyone recognizes the actual problem. Fixing it is another matter, but enough people have expressed a dedication to solving this imbalance that there is real hope.

What are your thoughts? Share in the comments!

1. Steve Johnson, “Chicago Sculptor Simone Leigh to Become First Black Woman to Represent U.S. at Venice Biennale,” chicagotribune.com, accessed February 10, 2021, https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/museums/ct-ent-artist-simone-leigh-first-black-woman-us-pavilion-venice-1017-20201016-hdxggkimb5bznlppanfqabd6zm-story.html.
2. Ibad
3. “Who Is Simone Leigh, and Why Is She Doing the U.S. Biennale Pavilion? – ARTnews.Com,” accessed February 10, 2021, https://www.artnews.com/feature/simone-leigh-who-is-she-why-is-she-famous-1234574361/.
4. “Simone Leigh,” in Wikipedia, February 7, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Simone_Leigh&oldid=1005462221.
5. “Who Is Simone Leigh, and Why Is She Doing the U.S. Biennale Pavilion? – ARTnews.Com,” accessed February 10, 2021, https://www.artnews.com/feature/simone-leigh-who-is-she-why-is-she-famous-1234574361/.
6. Ibid
7. Steve Johnson, “Chicago Sculptor Simone Leigh to Become First Black Woman to Represent U.S. at Venice Biennale,” chicagotribune.com, accessed February 10, 2021, https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/museums/ct-ent-artist-simone-leigh-first-black-woman-us-pavilion-venice-1017-20201016-hdxggkimb5bznlppanfqabd6zm-story.html.
8. “The Black Arts Curator, Activists for Representation and Decolonization of Western Art Museums,” Artblog, March 13, 2020, https://www.theartblog.org/2020/03/the-black-arts-curator-activists-for-representation-and-decolonization-of-western-art-museums/
9. “On the Rise: 54 Curators and Arts Leaders Who Took on New Appointments in 2020,” accessed February 10, 2021, https://www.culturetype.com/2020/12/22/on-the-rise-54-curators-and-arts-leaders-who-took-on-new-appointments-in-2020/.
10.  “Racial Equity in Arts Leadership (REAL),” Vanderbilt University, December 2, 2016, https://www.vanderbilt.edu/curbcenter/real/.