ART CITIES:New York -Simone Leigh

Simone Leigh works in various media including sculpture, video installation and social practice. Simone Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. The exhibition and residency at the New Museum marks a new chapter in her ongoing exploration of black subjectivities, particularly those of women.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo New Museum Archive

In her work, Simone Leigh demands that the concerns, roles, and rights of women of color are recognized as central, rather than pushed to the margins. “The Waiting Room” her exhibition and residency at the New Museum consider the possibilities of disobedience, desire, and self-determination as they manifest in resistance to an imposed state of deferral and debasement. Focusing specifically on an expanded notion of medicine, “The Waiting Room” references a wide range of care environments and opportunities (from herbalist apothecaries, to medicine markets in Durban, South Africa, to meditation rooms, to movement studios) and involves a range of public and private workshops and healing treatments. Blurring the distinction between bodily and spiritual health, or between wellness and happiness, Leigh convenes practitioners who view social justice as integral to their work. The project also takes into account a history of social inequalities that have necessitated community-organized care, traditionally provided by women, from the United Order of Tents, a secret society of nurses active since the Underground Railroad, to volunteers in the Black Panther Party’s embattled clinics active from the ‘60s to the ’80s. “The Waiting Room” suggests that creating a space for wellness may require both the making of a sanctuary and an act of disobedience against the systematic enactment and repudiation of black pain. This project developed out of an earlier iteration of Leigh’s socially engaged work “Free People’s Medical Clinic” (2014), organized by Creative Time, which provided free treatments and workshops over the course of four weekends in the former Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, home of Dr. Josephine English, the first black gynecologist in the state of New York.

Info: Curators Johanna Burton,Shaun Leonardo and Emily Mello, New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Duration: 22/6-18/9/16, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.newmuseum.org