“The tendency when people hear Black women’s stories is to focus on what happened to them, not the intellectual labor and creativity they brought to the situation,’ she said. ‘My work is about what they did from those compromised positions — the labor, the care, the love, the ideas."
Resolute, architectonic, and regal, Simone Leigh’s Las Meninas II is utterly arresting – boldly evocative of the themes of Black female subjectivity, sovereignty, and African diasporic artistic traditions that characterize her acclaimed practice. Executed in 2019, Las Meninas II unifies the most seminal iconography of the artist’s lauded and diverse corpus. Anchored by a dome-like raffia skirt, topped with a defiant ceramic female torso, and crowned with the artist’s signature intricately inlaid rosette motif, Las Meninas II has an entrancing and commanding presence. The sculpture epitomizes Leigh’s unparalleled ability to transport and transform – challenging Western aesthetic hierarchies, enlivening untold histories, and simultaneously redefining our understanding of the present. Evincing the institutional import of the present work, its sister sculpture, Las Meninas, was acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2019. One of the leading figures in Contemporary art today, Leigh was recently selected as the first Black female artist to represent the United States at the 59th Venice Biennale and was awarded its highest prize, the Golden Lion. The Boston Institute of Contemporary Art has just opened the first museum survey of Leigh’s work, on view from April – September 2023, which will tour the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and California African American Museum through 2024.
Through her practice, Leigh confronts the complexities and hybridities of Black femininity, domesticity, labor, and sovereignty through an exploration of the art of Africa and the African diaspora as well as the colonial narratives that have influenced Western interpretations of these multifaceted histories. Working frequently in ceramic and bronze, Leigh challenges the assumed hierarchies of Western art and expands the narrative and aesthetic possibilities of artistic production. At the core of Leigh’s practice is sculpture – she is a ceramicist who has worked for decades to reinvent and repurpose the medium. At the beginning of her career, the artist focused her exploration solely on the water vessel, a conduit for the historically unacknowledged labor of Black women. In an interview from 2022, she explains: “’For ten years, I was obsessed with these water pots… It was a kind of perfect form, and it was something women had been making all over the world for centuries, this anonymous labor of women.’” (Simone in conversation with Calvin Tompkins, “The Monumental Success of Simone Leigh,” The New Yorker, March 21, 2022 (online))
“…as I work I imagine a kind of experience, a state of being, rather than one person.”
At six feet tall and seven feet wide, Las Meninas II confronts the viewer with a heroic, unassailable presence. The base of the sculpture is composed by a prodigious skirt made of raffia, a species of indigenous palm native to areas of Africa, which Leigh has employed in several major projects, including her Venice Biennale exhibition. The raffia skirt operates as an inverted basin or vessel, claiming the space contained within, an expansion of the inquiries which occupied Leigh’s nascent career. From the architectural skirt of the sculpture, emerges the torso of a nude female form, molded in terracotta. The figure’s arms are abruptly bent, and hands form fists at its waist – an archetypal symbol for power and defiance. The face of the figure in turn is defined by its absence. Intricate rosettes encircle the cavity in the head, referencing perhaps the anonymity of generations of Black female labor and the omission of Black representation in Western portraiture. Leigh explains of the question of portraiture in her works: “…as I work I imagine a kind of experience, a state of being, rather than one person.” (Simone Leigh quoted in: Nancy Kennedy, “Simone Leigh, now in the spotlight, contemplates the theme of invisibility,” The Art Newspaper, 24 April 2019 (online))
Though Leigh has created a small group of other female figures with raffia skirts, only the present work and its counterpart at the Cleveland Museum are uniquely named Las Meninas, a reference the canonical painting by Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656, in the collects ion of the Prado Museum, Madrid. Venerated as a masterpiece of European art, Las Meninas critically engages the viewer in questions of illusion, power, representation, and viewership which are also central to Leigh’s own artistic inquiries. In his painting, Velázquez’s inverted the assumed focal point of the portrait, inserting himself painting in the composition and revealing the inherent illusion and layers of viewership in the portrait itself. As the viewer of Las Meninas (1656), one is in the position of the artist’s sitters, the King and Queen of Spain, whose reflections are only visible in the mirror on the back wall of the room. The Spanish princess, gazing quizzically at the viewer, and her attendants surrounding her, are transformed from onlookers to subjects of Velázquez’s scene. Las meninas (the ladies-in-waiting) and the princess don large, vessel-like skirts, which inspired the design of the present sculpture. Velázquez’s seventeenth-century work is regarded today for the questions it raises about our gaze as the viewer and the levels of illusive reality layered throughout the composition. Over three centuries later, Leigh imitates the iconic skirts of las meninas and, once again, contends with a question of viewership – the seen and unseen. Leigh’s twenty-first-century sculptures seem to embody the ladies-in-waiting, the figures in Velázquez’s composition who were not.mes ant to be depicted but.mes ant to be concealed, their identities anonymous. Utilizing an iconic symbol from the European canon, Leigh explores Black female subjectivity and the gaze of the viewer through her own poignant iconography.
Encapsulating the major thematic and aesthetic currents of Leigh’s practice, Las Meninas II is a superlative exemplar of the artist’s body of work to date. Through her vanguard practice, Leigh engages with complex histories of artistic production and reception, creating resoundingly powerful works which demand new ways of looking, analyzing, and honoring. Focusing on the experience of Black women, Leigh uses new hybridities to observe their histories and power.
