Simone Leigh’s ceramic practice embodies Black female subjectivity by alchemizing organic, historically inspired forms into beautiful and grand sculptures, rich with meaning. A potent facet of African American culture, ceramics, originally considered a craft for enslaved people, have been reclaimed within the sphere of high art by numerous modern and contemporary Black ceramicists. Leigh, one of the most prominent names working within the field, leads through “critical fabulation,” a theoretical framework she shares with scholars including Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Hortense Spillers, which is defined by ICA Boston curator Eva Respini as “a strategy that invites historians, artists, and critics to creatively fill in the gaps of history.” Leigh uses critical fabulation to imbue her archivally informed signature vessels with higher truths about the Black female experience. In the span of her nearly 25-year career, Leigh has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and has represented the United States at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.
Simone Leigh, Untitled, salt-fired stoneware, 2001. Sold June 2020 for $75,000.
Repeated Symbolism in Simone Leigh’s Sculptures
Leigh repeatedly revisits the same symbols in her ceramic works—aspects of the feminine bodily form and the cowrie shell—drawing inspiration from the visual traditions of African vessels dating back to ancient times. To enhance their importance and meaning, Leigh utilizes epic scale, repetition of forms, and atmospheric salt-glazing to create glossy finishes. Equally compelled by the artistic forms of the works and by what they symbolize, Leigh’s work prompts us to confront feminine labor and authorship, as well as the role women play as “vessels” within their communities.
Simone Leigh, Untitled, glazed terra cotta stoneware, circa 2011-12. Sold October 2023 for $149,000.
The cowrie shell, often used in historic African sculpture as eyes and mouths, is referred to by Leigh in a 2012 artnet article as a “flexible” symbol; it relates back to its historical significance in African culture as a valuable currency for international trade, including the slave trade; in addition to holding talismanic qualities of protection in African spiritual tradition. Leigh’s cowries are cast from molds of watermelons, lending them their oversized scale whilst also confronting racist stereotypes associated with the fruit. Each ceramic is unique; Leigh works in the unpredictable technique of salt-glazing, using a mix of gloss, matte, and brilliant iridescent finishes, splattering and speckling the vessels in tonal and contrasting muted hues. Leigh’s forms and glazes interact, when in earthy tones, to inspire appreciation of the inherent elemental beauty of earth, while shinier, alien finishes summon ideas of Afrofuturism and a rewriting of the past. (Featured in the June 4 sale is a cowrie shell from 2012. Browse the lot here.)
Simone Leigh, Head, glazed and painted fired stoneware, 2004. Sold December 2020 for $93,750.
Simone Leigh’s Foray into Ceramics
Initially drawn to the practice of ceramics while a student at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, her interest in African pottery crystallized during an internship under the curator of ceramics at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. Of the development of her interest in the medium, Leigh explained in an interview with the New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins that “it was something women had been making all over the world for centuries, this anonymous labor of women.” Fascinated by the meanings held by these objects, Leigh developed her symbolically rooted practice through the study of nineteenth-century colonial texts on ancient African pottery techniques, revealing her own subjectivity as a diasporic contemporary artist reconnecting with the craft. Though initially Leigh struggled to gain visibility for her ceramics, which were still not taken seriously in the fine art world, she began to receive institutional recognition in the early 2010s, when she became a 2010-2011 Studio Museum in Harlem artist in residence and received grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and Creative Capital.
Simone Leigh, Untitled (Vessel), glazed terra cotta stoneware, circa 2004. Sold October 2021 for $149,000.
Related Reading | Unsung Heroes: Black Ceramicists
Exhibition History
Since Leigh’s participation in the 2022 Venice Biennale, for which she won the Golden Lion for Best participant, she has presented her own intellectual symposium for Black women thinkers entitled Loophole of Retreat: Venice and has been the subject of a traveling exhibition surveying her entire career. The show, simply titled Simone Leigh, opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and travelled to the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles (2023-2025). In addition to being on display and in the collections of museums nationwide, Leigh has created numerous public installations in bronze, including Brick House (2019), which was displayed at the High Line, New York, and Sentinel (2021).
Since our first offering of Leigh’s ceramics in 2019, with a 2006 salt-fired stoneware vessel selling for $93,750, we have helped to establish price levels for her work as it first emerged on the auction market. To this day, Swann continually offers Leigh’s early ceramic works with success.
Browse upcoming works by Simone Leigh.
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