The First Time
Simone Leigh became the first Black woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2022. This fact is significant and the significance of it is uncomfortable — it is a first that should have happened long before, that is both an achievement and a reminder of the depth of the exclusion it partially addresses. The art world tends to celebrate firsts without fully sitting with what they mean. I want to sit with it for a moment.
The Biennale is a strange institution — a biennial exhibition that has existed since 1895, that represents the art world's version of national prestige, that has historically reflected the power structures of the world that hosts it. The American pavilion has been occupied over the decades by names that constitute a certain kind of art history. That Leigh is the first Black woman in that list is information about a hundred and twenty-seven years of decisions, of who was considered, of what the art world thought the United States should show the world.
Leigh's work — large-scale bronze and ceramic sculpture that draws from the history of African and African diaspora artistic traditions, that depicts Black female figures with a monumentality and a dignity that the Western sculptural tradition has rarely granted them — was perfectly, even painfully, suited to this context. Putting her work in the American pavilion was putting the thing the pavilion had historically left out directly at the center.
The Sculptures Themselves
The work Leigh made for Venice is among the most powerful of her career. The architectural and sculptural vocabulary she has developed over years — the thatch roofs that merge architecture and figure, the ceramic forms drawn from African aesthetic traditions, the bronze figures that feel genuinely monumental in a way that doesn't require scale to achieve — reached a kind of synthesis here.
The title of the exhibition, 'Sovereignty,' is the governing concept. Sovereignty over one's body, over one's representation, over the space one occupies. The figures Leigh makes are not asking for anything. They are simply there, fully present, sovereign in the most literal sense.
I keep thinking about the quality of presence in these sculptures — the way they occupy space, the way they hold their ground, the way standing near them produces an awareness of your own body in relation to theirs. Sculpture at its best does this: makes the space between objects and bodies charged, makes being near something mean something.
What the Golden Lion Meant
Leigh won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. The award is given by juries, which means it involves evaluation, debate, judgment by people with their own perspectives and limitations. That she won it doesn't mean the recognition is simple or unambiguous.
But it meant something. It meant that the institution — that particular institution, at that particular moment — recognized her work as the best of what it was doing. The first Black woman. The best national presentation.
Those two facts sitting together say something about where the art world is and where it's been and the distance between them. We're not done reckoning with that distance.
But the work is extraordinary. That's separate from the reckoning, and it matters separately.
The sculptures will travel. They'll appear in museums, in collections, in the increasingly diverse landscape of art world visibility that the last decade has been slowly, imperfectly building. They deserve the rooms they'll be given and they'll transform those rooms in the way that work of this weight always does — by making the space around them feel charged, by making you aware of the fact that you're in the presence of something that was made with absolute intentionality and complete seriousness.
The first Black woman. It keeps coming back to that. Not because the work is a symbol — it isn't, or it's not only that, it's much more than that — but because the fact of the first means something about how long the room was closed. We're still reckoning with what that closed room cost.
