This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition, Simone Leigh, organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston and held at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, April 6-September 4, 2023, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., November 3, 2023-March 3, 2024, and jointly at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and California African American Museum (CAAM) in Los Angeles June 2024-January 2025.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Foreword / Jill Medvedow -- Introduction: Simone Leigh, sculpting time / Eva Respini -- Plates -- Extended notes on the riot / Saidiya Hartman -- "If you never...you don't...": the aesthetic (forms) of refusal / Denise Ferreira da Silva -- Plates -- Awaiting her verb / Rizvana Bradley -- Passing the torch: Black women, intimacy, and arson in Conspiracy / Yasmina Price -- Plates -- Clay's memory / Vanessa Agard-Jones -- The ceramics of Simone Leigh / Sequoia Miller -- Women in the yard: the legacy of Afro-Jamaican ceramics / Rianna Jade Parker -- Plates -- A glossary of the tangible and unfettered / Katherine McKittrick -- Simone Leigh: Caribbean Diasporas and cleansing the "colonial stain" / Daniella Rose King -- Plates -- Simone Leigh: the alchemy of architecture / Steven Nelson -- The vernacular revered / Jessica Lynne -- Survival theory, or, the idea of Africa / Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts -- Plates -- Simone Leigh: "a journey to scale" / Christina Sharpe -- Simone Leigh and the monumental / Hortense J. Spillers -- Plates -- Chronology of social sculpture works / Anni A. Pullagura -- Simone Leigh's social sculpture / Tavia Nyong'o -- Plates -- Be Black baby! Simone Leigh's Performance Commons / Uri McMillan -- Roving notes through an embodied archive that presents something "more true than fact" / Nomaduma Masilela -- Conversation / Malik Gaines, Simone Leigh, and Lorraine O'Grady -- Plates -- Works in the exhibition -- Acknowledgments -- Contributors -- Lenders to the exhibition -- Supporters -- The Trustees of the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston -- Reproduction credits -- Index -- Ars diagnostic / Dionne Brand.

"Over the last twenty years Simone Leigh has created a multi-faceted body of work incorporating sculpture, video, and installation, all informed by her ongoing exploration of Black female-identified subjectivity. Leigh describes her work as auto-ethnographic, and her salt-glazed ceramic and bronze sculptures often employ forms traditionally associated with African art. Her performance-influenced installations create spaces where historical precedent and self-determination commingle. "I am charting a history of change and adaptation," the artist has written, "through objects and gesture and the unstoppable forward movement of Black women." Simone Leigh was born in Chicago in 1967 and first began exhibiting her work in the early-2000s. She has had one-person museum exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Tate Gallery, London; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles among others. In 2014 she presented "The Free People's Medical Clinic" in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, a project commissioned by Creative Time. Her work was included in the 2012 and 2019 Biennial exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and she is the first artist to be commissioned for the High Line Plinth; her monumental sculpture Brick House was unveiled in April 2019. In 2022, Leigh represented the United States at the 59th Venice Biennale with her exhibition, "Simone Leigh: Sovereignty." Her work was also included in the Biennale's central exhibition, "The Milk of Dreams," for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Participant." -- Biography taken from: https://matthewmarks.com/artists/simone-leigh