Troubling the Line: Simone Leigh on Curating

My colleague Costa Petridis, Rita Knox Chair and Curator, Arts of Africa, had asked me and our fellow curatorial department chairs to collaborate on ways we might incorporate objects from the Arts of Africa collection into other gallery spaces while his galleries are temporarily closed. The idea of juxtaposing works in this way was certainly intriguing and for me, as chair and curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, instantly brought to mind images of Simone’s striking and innovative sculptures, which draw their inspiration from African and Afro-diasporic traditions.

I was thrilled when she agreed to join me as curator on this project. Simone and I chose 15 African objects and expanded upon a complementary selection of works from Modern and Contemporary Art to include objects from Applied Arts of Europe, Textiles, and Prints and Drawings, along with a few loaned works. From there we conceived an installation that would function as a constellation of multidirectional movement—one leading to tangled encounters between these objects and “troubling,” to use Simone’s word, tidy historical narratives.

Simone spent some time with me recently to discuss Critical Fabulation and a few of the revelations and insights it has surfaced so far.

Simone Leigh: I think that people are generally familiar and comfortable with the idea that artists like Picasso and Giacometti were very deliberately drawing on works of art from Africa, but a lot of the more complex legacies of African art are not as obvious. 

Paulina Pobocha: I think I mentioned how Robert Rauschenberg told, I think it was John Outterbridge, that it was his time at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and seeing Black folk art or Black vernacular art traditions that drew him to making assemblages. 

Simone: Exactly. There’s so much of that in the American South. Wow.

Paulina: We have works by Emanoel Araujo and Ana Mendieta in this show. Both artists are looking inward at their own diasporic histories—their inherited traditions as Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban artists, respectively. They’re not looking at the continent of Africa, but they are seeing it in translation, we could say.

Your sculpture Martinique, a loan to this exhibition, addresses many of these issues. It’s been interesting to think about its materiality as an object. It draws on techniques that you learned in places such as South Africa for making vessels in a traditional way. 

Looking at it in the company of vessels made in Africa, I started to see it not only as a figure of a woman but also as a vessel—not as a metaphor, but actually, in the volume of her skirt, for instance. It becomes an upside-down cup or pot. And the skirt has an overlay of lace that you dipped in porcelain and fired. Lace originates in either Milan or Flanders, porcelain famously from China. So the sculpture really becomes a hybrid object. And having these three elements—one atop the next—I thought was a succinct summary of so many ideas in this show.

In addition to the work’s materiality, we should talk about its subject matter, which points beyond the sculpture.

Simone: Yeah. Empress Josephine was Napoleon’s first wife, and she was born on the Caribbean island Martinique, which at the time was a French colony. She had around 200 slaves. They actually have a name for the landowners and previous slave owners in Martinique—they’re called the Békés. They have a whole class. Josephine was responsible for extending slavery on the island by a year and a half, and there used to be a sculpture of her there that was beheaded, which I reference in my sculpture.

Paulina: Nearby in the exhibition is a 19th-century teacup that once belonged to Empress Josephine that’s part of our Applied Arts of Europe collection. The cup and saucer were made while the empress was in Paris to remind her of the place where she was born. Kit Maxwell, the chair of that department, suggested it before he knew anything about the inclusion of your sculpture in the presentation, and it turned out to be weirdly serendipitous. 

Simone: I love that teacup so much. And it is dark, it’s a very dark teacup. 

Paulina: It is a very, very dark teacup, metaphorically speaking. It’s incredible how this beautiful and benign porcelain object points to such a disturbing history.

It was made in France, and it’s a portrait of Martinique, in a way, with references like the scallop shell and the coral handle. So there you have another kind of convergence. But in this case, it’s fantastical or completely imagined—Europeans picturing the Caribbean in a teacup or as a teacup. That’s someone’s projection of Martinique, presumably—someone that had never been there. 

Simone: Most likely, yeah. Or just the idea of representing a country with objects we collect from that country, as opposed to referring to some kind of history. 

Paulina: What drew you to select the Oromo pilgrim’s staffs? I remember reading that they are carried by Muslims. Someone carries them on a pilgrimage, not as a walking staff, but as a signal that they are a pilgrim, which is why they’re so thin and lightweight and beautiful.

Simone: I just think they are stunning. I like how they’re the first thing you see when you walk in.

Paulina: Yeah, they’re beautiful. 

Simone: That’s really why I chose them—for their beauty. I think people think that African art in general functions differently as artwork than artwork from the West, and that things that we now call art would not necessarily have been categorized as art before they were collected. But there are works, like these staffs, where my entire interest in them is their formal beauty. It was interesting to put them in the same room with Eva Hesse’s Untitled from 1969, another thin, attenuated sculpture. When these works are shown together, it’s easy to see the formal beauty of the staffs in ways not dissimilar to how we see Hesse’s work. I really like the combination. 

Paulina: And that question of what’s an artwork, of who decides, is central to the objects we included.

Simone: I’ve also always been fascinated with African pots, particularly the way they’ve been treated—always on the lesser-valued end of African art objects. And I think that’s because they are women’s work.

I interned at the Smithsonian when I was 18, after my freshman year of college, and the National Museum of African Art had recently opened. I worked with their ceramics curator, and I Xeroxed all the information they had about their pots. The information was either from some colonial entity, or it was from missionaries or pseudo-anthropologists that were just drawing descriptions of how each of the pots were made and how they were used. I used that info to teach myself how to make those pots. I also did a one-day workshop with Winnie Owens-Hart while she was teaching at Howard. She had been going to Ghana to do pot making, and she invited me to come over one day and taught me a couple of things that I still do today.

Paulina: Oh wow. 

Simone: But there seems to be a very different approach and understanding around these pots today than there was when I was 18. They’re more valued. Previously it felt like objects that were made by men, or were very elaborate, or were used in rituals, were seen as being in a different category than objects from the domestic sphere. It’s been exciting to see people start to realize that it’s much more complicated.

Paulina: Well, this is the most obvious thing to say, but these objects are always seen in the context of right now. Right? Their meanings always change. 

Simone: Yeah. There’s also a really ferocious argument about where the line is between art and craft, and I think African art in general really troubles that line. There’s this sense that with craft, the maker isn’t thinking—that they’re just making something over and over. And it’s not true. 

Paulina: Right. That’s a really great point. And museums generally have categories for their objects. Sometimes they’re organized by department: “Arts of the Americas” or “Textiles.” These categories often mimic how art history is broken down, especially when the divisions are chronological or geographic. And categories can allow people to navigate through museums, among other things. But these objects have lives outside of these boundaries. A textile, for example, could be from the Americas, to state the obvious.

And I think that maybe what this presentation does in the most basic way, especially in the context of a museum like this one, which has such a wide range of objects made at different times and in different places, is to point to the ways that these rules and these categories are totally invented.

Simone: Totally invented by us—or whoever is naming these things. 

Paulina: With this show, so many surprising resonances came to the surface that I think neither of us, or I certainly, were expecting. By removing these objects from the context that they typically exist in, we’ve found that the objects themselves can feel very different.

Simone: Yes. We always think that context is going to enrich our understanding of something, but sometimes removing that context or changing it significantly can actually help us see artworks we think we understand in new ways. It’s very exciting.

—Simone Leigh, artist, and Paulina Pobocha, chair and curator, Modern and Contemporary Art

Critical Fabulation is on view in Gallery 289 of the Modern Wing through January 4.

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