Simone Leigh

Leigh recently received the inaugural commission for the High Line’s new public art platform, the Plinth, which will be unveiled in 2019. In the meantime, her current show features recent ceramic and mixed media works that likewise deal with the role women of color played in transmitting the culture of Africa to the African Diaspora. The sculptures here include totemic female heads (doubling, in some cases as vessels) made of ceramic or bronze. Elsewhere, similar heads have been balanced atop full-length figures wearing raffia skirts that voluminously billow out to resemble thatched huts.