Venice Biennale: Simone Leigh
Simone Leigh was on the phone from Venice. It’s not all here yet, she told me.
She had been installing her exhibition of bronzes and ceramics in the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale — one of the most prestigious commissions in the art world, and the first time it has been awarded to a Black female artist. This edition of the Biennale had been delayed a year by Covid-19, and, Leigh reported, it has not been spared disruptions: “Satellite,” a 24-foot bronze female form with a concave disc for a head, destined for the forecourt of the Pavilion, was in transit, not certain to arrive in time for next week’s opening.
But Leigh was unperturbed. The pièce de résistance exceeded her hopes. She was giving the building a makeover: A neo-Palladian structure with white columns that waves to Jeffersonian architecture, it has gone African, with a thatched roof that drapes partway down the facade, supported by a discreet metal armature and wooden poles.
Seeing the work of her architect Pierpaolo Martiradonna and his team, what struck Leigh was the rich fullness: the shagginess of the thatch, the forest effect of the wood poles. She was into it. “It has an over-the-top Blackness that I really like,” she said.
The concept was “1930s African palace,” she said — a notion that takes aim at the Colonial Exposition held in Paris in 1931, in which France and other powers showed off their territories, featuring replicas — or amalgams — of local architecture and sometimes “natives” brought in to inhabit them.
Beyond this, Leigh is making a pointed connection to the shared history of global exhibitions that includes the Biennale itself, with its classic national pavilions from the interwar years. In the heyday of Modernism, nations saw no contradiction between flaunting the colonial “civilizing mission” and their high-art achievements. Read the entire story in The New York Times
