Thursday, December 11, 2025

Black body Monumentalism - Simone Leigh





Rooted in diasporic histories and ceramic traditions, her work carves space for an architecture of care and defiance within institutions that have long erased or diminished Black presence. She does not seek inclusion; she imposes visibility through scale, mythic form, and a refusal to disassociate beauty from political weight. Her monumentality is not celebratory in the classical sense—it is insurgent, reworking the language of Western public sculpture to elevate subjects long held at the margins. In the face of dominant North American narratives of art and power, her figures stand, defiantly and silently, as counter-histories—guardians of resilience, witnesses to erasure, and emblems of a future carved from ancestral memory.