“I’ve had 30 years to make a ton of mistakes,” said the sculptor Simone Leigh, who is representing the U.S. at this year’s Venice Biennale. “Now I feel ready, and for some reason I’m not intimidated.”
A modern-day Tocqueville, surveying American life from a friendly distance, could easily conclude that we are living in an era of Black ascendancy. This might sound crazy to Black people who cope with oppression and injustice on a daily basis, but in the cultural sphere the prominence that African Americans have held for more than a century in music is increasingly evident across many genres.
Two nearly finished clay figures were in the big room when I was there, both of them realistic and more than twice life-size: a standing woman, nude and headless , and a woman bent at the waist, with both arms extended outward. “Women washing clothes in a river became a typical postcard in Jamaica during the late nineteenth century,” Leigh said. Leigh’s parents are Jamaican, and she spent time there when she was a child.
When I talked with Leigh in Philadelphia, she hadn’t made a final decision on the works that will be in her Venice exhibition. She planned to include a number of her new clay pieces, in addition to the bronzes. “I’m still very much someone who works with clay,” she said. She and the Strattons had, in defiance of contemporary trends, returned the practice of clay-modelling for bronze to a handmade process.
The Nazarene Church condemned many aspects of secular life, but Leigh’s parents believed in education. Three of the Leigh children attended Kenwood High, a strong public school in Hyde Park, and all of them excelled. Stephanie and Steven went on to a Nazarene college in rural Illinois. Whitney, who spent high-school summers studying Russian, had pushed his independence too far. In his last year of middle school, he skipped classes for two days to visit a girlfriend, and his parents found out.
Michael Thiedeman introduced her to working with clay. Thiedeman was well known in the pottery world. He had studied for two years with an American master potter, Warren MacKenzie, whose teacher had been the great English ceramic artist and scholar Bernard Leach. Thiedeman had a deep knowledge of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean pottery; he liked to say that he was essentially “a refugee from a different century.” Leigh had taken a ceramics class in high school, but it hadn’t caught her interest.
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