The US artist Simone Leigh will take over the Royal Academy of Arts in London late 2027 in the largest exhibition of her works to date, say officials at the RA. “Bringing together bronze and ceramic sculpture with film in large-scale installations, Leigh will create monumental new works on occasion of this exhibition,” the Royal Academy says in a statement.
The Royal Academy exhibition will be curated by Tarini Malik who organised the show of works by the Ghanaian-British artist John Akomfrah in the British Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Leigh represented the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale, making her the first Black woman to secure the prestigious commission.
Leigh told The Guardian that a theme of the forthcoming London show will be architecture and art made under fascist regimes. “I’ve been thinking about American history a lot in the development of these works because we’re now living under full-on fascism here,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about the kind of art that’s made under fascism.”
She adds: “All institutions are under attack. I know of artists who have signed contracts to do commissions and these commissions have been either stalled or cancelled for anti-DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] reasons. So it’s really happening… I’m more than concerned, it’s getting a little scary.”
In January, the US president Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing”, in effect terminating DEI initiatives across federal institutions.
Chicago-born Leigh is known for sculpture, video, performance and social projects that focus on race, history and gender, but above all on the Black female experience. Her art, executed in materials like ceramics, raffia and bronze, is inspired by ancient African and African-American objects as well as ethnography, the history of architecture, feminist criticism and chronicles of political resistance.
In 2018, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum awarded Leigh the Hugo Boss Prize. She also featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and created the colossal piece Brick House (2018-19), a 16-ft-tall bust of a Black woman, for the High Line in Manhattan. Leigh won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale for Brick House which was included in the main exhibition Milk of Dreams. In an interview in 2019, the artist discussed her practice and some of her key works including Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014) and Head with Cobalt (2018).
