Simone Leigh’s Sovereignty: Inside the US Pavilion at Venice

ART & CULTURE · VENICE

Reading time: 9 min

In 2022, Simone Leigh became the first Black woman given a solo presentation in the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and she used the commission to rebuild the building itself. A thatched roof went up over its neoclassical columns. Bronzes taller than the doorway stood in its forecourt. Inside, stoneware jugs the size of washing machines carried the memory of potters who were never allowed to sign their own names. Sovereignty is a pavilion that argues its case in materials before it says a word.

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Every four years, the United States sends one commission to represent it in the Giardini della Biennale, and for ninety years the building it sends that commission into has looked much the same: white columns, a domed rotunda, a lawn in front of it modelled loosely on Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. In 2022, the artist chosen to fill it was Simone Leigh, and she was the first Black woman in the pavilion’s history to be given the space alone.

Her exhibition was called Sovereignty. It ran at the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, from 23 April to 27 November 2022, under the overarching theme The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani. The commission came from Jill Medvedow, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the exhibition was curated by the ICA’s chief curator, Eva Respini.

What Leigh built inside and around that building was not a survey of new work so much as a single, sustained argument, carried across bronze, stoneware and a wooden roof structure that briefly changed the pavilion’s silhouette. The subject was Black femme subjectivity, and the method was to fill the gaps in the historical record with new hybrid forms rather than simply pointing at the gaps. What follows is what she actually built, who she is, and a connection between one particular jug and a museum show that opened the following year that most coverage of the pavilion has never drawn.

The building itself became the first work

The United States Pavilion in the Giardini was completed in 1930, designed by the American architects Chester Holmes Aldrich and William Adams Delano in a Palladian style, with a columned portico and a domed rotunda at its centre. Visitors to the Biennale walk past it, or into it, without necessarily registering that it is a piece of architecture making an argument of its own: a plantation-adjacent classicism, exported to a European garden as a statement of taste and permanence.

Leigh’s first intervention was to the building, not inside it. She commissioned a structure titled Façade (2022): a thatched roof, raised on wooden poles, that wrapped around the pavilion and obscured its original columns and pediment. The reference was specific. Leigh has described the form as drawing on the West African dwellings that were reconstructed, with people inside them, as living exhibits at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, an event staged across the Bois de Vincennes to present France’s colonies as spectacle for a metropolitan audience, complete with reconstructed villages that visitors walked through as though they were pavilions at a fair. Putting a version of that architecture over a building modelled on Jefferson’s plantation house closed a historical loop that the pavilion had never previously had to answer for. Two structures built a century apart, on two different continents, for two different kinds of display, were suddenly made to sit inside one another. Visitors arrived at Sovereignty before they had crossed the threshold.

Sentinel and Satellite: the bronzes that met visitors outside

Two large bronzes stood in the space the thatched roof created, and both took their forms from West African ritual objects rather than from figurative sculpture in the European tradition.

Sentinel (2022) is an elongated bronze figure, more than sixteen feet tall, that combines the silhouette of fertility and ritual objects into a single vertical form standing sentry at the pavilion’s edge. Satellite (2022), at twenty-four feet, is the more explicit piece of historical reworking. Its form is drawn from the D’mba, a wooden headdress traditionally worn on the shoulders during ceremonies by the Baga peoples of the Guinea coast, representing an idealised mother figure and carried by a dancer whose own body disappeared beneath a costume of raffia and cloth, its base historically wrapped in deep indigo fabric so that the fabric moved as the wearer danced and the headdress itself appeared to float above the crowd. Leigh kept the D’mba’s proportions and its function as, in her own description, a vessel for receiving and a tool for communicating, and replaced its head with the dish of a satellite receiver. A ritual object built to gather a community’s attention became, without changing its logic at all, a piece of contemporary communications hardware, still doing the job it was always built for.

Jug, Anonymous and the return to clay

Leigh trained as a ceramicist before she cast a single bronze, and the pavilion’s interior returned to that material with two monumental stoneware pieces that carry the exhibition’s most specific historical reference.

Jug (2021 to 2022) is a glazed stoneware vessel more than five feet across, its form drawn from the alkaline-glazed jugs and jars made in the Edgefield District of South Carolina in the nineteenth century, first by enslaved potters and later by the free Black craftspeople among them. Leigh surfaced the piece with raised cowrie shell forms, moulded, unusually, from watermelons rather than from the shells themselves, folding a historically loaded fruit into a historically loaded vessel form. Anonymous (2022) takes the same starting point further: a face jug, a form Edgefield potters used to mark graves and to ward off evil, scaled up past six feet and given the same cowrie surface. In the pavilion’s final gallery, ceramic and raffia works extended the same argument into the specifically gendered processes, weaving, coiling, glazing, that Leigh has spent two decades treating as historical evidence rather than decoration.

Who Simone Leigh is, and what she had already built

Leigh was born in Chicago in 1967 to Jamaican immigrant parents. She studied at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, graduating in 1990 with a degree in art and a minor in philosophy, and an internship at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art redirected her toward the ceramic and sculptural traditions she has worked in since. She moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, taught herself ceramics while raising her daughter, and has said she resisted calling herself an artist outright until 2001.

By the time she was selected to represent the United States in October 2020, Leigh already had a substantial body of major public work behind her, and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2012) and the Hugo Boss Prize (2018) alongside it. The Waiting Room (2016), at the New Museum, addressed Black women’s experience of the American healthcare system. Sharifa (2015), her first portrait sculpture, entered the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Brick House (2019), a five-and-a-half-metre bronze bust of a Black woman rising from a form that reads at once as a hoop skirt and a West African clay dwelling, was the inaugural commission for the High Line Plinth in New York, and a cast of it now stands permanently on the University of Pennsylvania campus. That trajectory, from a Brooklyn studio where she taught herself ceramics while raising her daughter to the plinth of one of New York’s most visited public artworks, is the direct run-up to Venice: every material decision in Sovereignty, the bronze, the stoneware, the raffia, had already been tested at full scale before she ever received the pavilion commission.

The Golden Lion, and the sculpture that actually won it

Leigh’s selection for the pavilion and her Golden Lion are two separate honours, awarded for two different things, and the distinction is worth making precisely because most short accounts of Sovereignty collapse them into one story.

The Golden Lion for Best Participant went to Leigh for her contribution to the central international exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, at the Arsenale, not for her presentation in the US Pavilion. The work that won it was a cast of Brick House, given a prominent position at the Arsenale’s entrance, lit and flanked by the building’s original brick columns. So the same sculpture already standing on a Pennsylvania campus was, at the same moment, the single most decorated object at the world’s most closely watched contemporary art exhibition, while a mile away in the Giardini its maker was rewriting the architecture of the pavilion representing her own country. Both facts are true, they involve two different pieces of the exhibition apparatus, and together they made 2022 the first year a single artist held both distinctions at once.

The observation that connects Venice back to Edgefield

There is a detail here that most coverage of Sovereignty, written in the weeks after the pavilion opened, could not yet have included, because it had not happened.

Jug, the Edgefield-referencing stoneware piece that stood inside the pavilion in Venice, went on to appear in Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina, a touring exhibition organised jointly by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which opened at the Met in September 2022 and moved to the MFA in March 2023. That show brought together twelve surviving works by David Drake, known as Dave the Potter, an enslaved craftsman working in Edgefield between the 1820s and the 1870s who incised his massive stoneware jars with verses at a time when teaching an enslaved person to write was itself a criminal act, alongside nineteen of the district’s face vessels. Leigh’s Jug was placed among them, and she contributed an interview to the accompanying catalogue.

The result is that the vessel she built for Venice, a contemporary hybrid standing in for a tradition she could only approach through the historical record, ended up in the same room as the actual nineteenth-century jars that record was built from, within a year of the Biennale closing. Sovereignty argued that Leigh could imaginatively fill the gaps left by an incomplete archive. Hear Me Now then put her filled-in version back into direct contact with the archive itself, and neither work suffered for the comparison.

Final thoughts

The easy version of this story is a landmark: first Black woman, solo, in a pavilion built in 1930. That fact matters and it is worth stating plainly. But it undersells what Sovereignty actually did with the opportunity. Leigh did not treat the pavilion as a neutral box to fill with objects. She treated it as the first object, put a thatched roof over its columns, and made visitors walk through a piece of contested architectural history before they reached anything she had made in bronze or clay.

Inside, the bronzes borrowed the logic of a Baga ceremonial headdress and a face jug and pushed it forward rather than backward, arriving at a satellite dish and a five-foot vessel that still function, structurally, exactly as their sources did. That is the real argument of Sovereignty: that the historical record’s gaps are not empty space to be mourned but material to build with, and that a sculptor working in bronze and stoneware can close them as precisely as a historian working in an archive. A year later, one of her own jugs stood among the actual Edgefield jars that had inspired it, and the argument held.