Simone Leigh was born on 1967 and is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States.
21 Facts About Simone Leigh
2.
Simone Leigh's work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society.
3.
Simone Leigh was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
4.
Simone Leigh was born in 1967 in Chicago, Illinois to Jamaican missionaries.
5.
Simone Leigh grew up on Chicago's South Side in a highly segregated neighborhood.
6.
Simone Leigh attended Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana; she received a BA in Art with a minor in Philosophy in 1990.
7.
Simone Leigh combines her training in American ceramics with an interest in African pottery, using African motifs which tend to have modernist characteristics.
8.
Simone Leigh has given artist lectures in many institutions nationally and internationally, and has taught in the ceramics department of the Rhode Island School of Design.
9.
In October 2020, Simone Leigh was selected to represent the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale.
10.
Simone Leigh was awarded a Golden Lion for her work Brick House in the main exhibition.
11.
Simone Leigh has exhibited internationally including: MoMA PS1, Walker Art Center, Studio Museum in Harlem, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Hammer Museum, The Kitchen, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Tilton Gallery, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, SculptureCenter, Perez Art Museum Miami, Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, L'appartement 22 in Rabat, Morocco, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and the Association for Visual Arts Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa.
12.
Simone Leigh organized an event with a group of women artists, who performed in "Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter" part of her solo exhibition, The Waiting Room at the New Museum in 2016.
13.
Simone Leigh's work was selected among "the most important and relevant work" by curators Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley for the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
14.
Simone Leigh is the creator of the Free People's Medical Clinic a social practice project created with Creative Time in 2014.
15.
Simone Leigh is the recipient of many awards, including: a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Venice Biennale Golden Lion ; The Herb Alpert Award; a Creative Capital grant; a Blade of Grass Fellowship; the Studio Museum in Harlem's Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize; the Guggenheim Museum's Hugo Boss Prize; United States Artists fellowship; and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award.
16.
Simone Leigh was named one of Artsy Editorial's "Most Influential Artists" of 2018.
17.
Simone Leigh's work has been written about in many publications, including Art in America, Artforum, Sculpture Magazine, Modern Painters, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Small Axe, and Bomb magazine.
18.
Simone Leigh is a recipient of the Venice Biennale Golden Lion ; the Studio Museum in Harlem's Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize ; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship ; Anonymous Was a Woman Award ; Herb Alpert Award in the Arts ; and A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art.
19.
In 2023, Simone Leigh's sculpture Stick, sold for $2.7 million at Christie's in New York, a record for the artist.
20.
Simone Leigh has staged many solo shows at galleries and museums in the United States and internationally, as well as several solo public art installations.
21.
Simone Leigh has participated in many group exhibitions, including the Dakar Biennale ; Berlin Biennale ; Whitney Biennial ; Prospect.