ArtNews, 2022
Nancy Princenthal reviews Simone Leigh’s 2022 exhibit Sovereignty which includes her first debuted video, “Conspiracy” that features O’Grady.
Venice Biennale
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New York Times, 2022
Siddhartha Mitter interviews Simone Leigh on Sovereignty, her installation for the U.S. Pavillion at the Venice Biennale. Leigh’s mentor, O’Grady, expresses enthusiasm for the symposium Loophole of Retreat that will accompany the show in October 2022.
2022 Harriet Jacobs sovereignty modernism ceramics Conceptualism Incidients in the Life of a Slave Girl feminism Venice Harlem sculpture Jamaica black female subjectivity Africa Studio Museum public practice Black feminism 1931 Colonial Exposition blackness Zora Neale Hurston colonialism architecture resistance “Conspiracy” (2022) critical race theory hybridity exhibition design historiography Brooklyn both/and black avant-garde gaze black women artists Loophole of Retreat Simone Leigh political art anagama black writers Guggenheim immigrant photography between worlds erasure/invisibility freedom Venice Biennale agency Chicago race and class enslavement US Pavillion Picasso the Kitchen
Hyperallergic, 2022
Seph Rodney recounts his experience at Simone Leigh’s symposium held in conjunction with the artist’s presentation of Leigh’s work at the US Pavilion for the Venice Biennale. The symposium “Loophole of Retreat” brought together artists and theorists alike to consider political liberation and sovereignty for Black women. He writes about Lorraine O’Grady’s conversation with Leigh, one that concerned the Decolonize Museums protests that happened outside of her retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021. She began to question just what the privilege of a solo institutional show provided her, and how she could make new allyships with those afforded less power than her, notably trans activists.