Eliana Willis

The title of the U.S. pavilion at next year’s 59th Venice Biennale will be “Simone Leigh: Grittin“—and come fall, the artist will host a major convening, “Loophole of Retreat: Venice,” for the occasion.
The new details about the eagerly-anticipated exhibition—Simone Leigh is the first Black woman artist to represent the U.S. at the prestigious event—were revealed today by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the pavilion’s commissioner, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston.
“This will be the first time the U.S. Pavilion is entirely dedicated to the experiences and contributions of Black women,” Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s director, said in a statement. “Global in its research and references, intergenerational and collaborative in its lines of inquiry, Leigh’s exhibition will leave an indelible mark on all who visit the pavilion.”
And while many in the art world will make a pilgrimage to Venice for the biennale’s opening in April, Leigh hopes audiences will book a return trip in the fall. Just as she did during her 2019 solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the artist is holding an event—this time a three-day affair—that takes its name from the 1861 autobiography of the formerly enslaved Harriet Jacobs, who christened the crawlspace she lived in after gaining her freedom a “loophole of retreat.”
Simone Leigh, Las Meninas (2019). Photo: Farzad Owrang, courtesy of the artist and the Cleveland Museum of Art, © Simone Leigh.
Featuring performances, film screenings, and conversations, as well as an international slate of scholars, artists, and activists, the symposium is organized by Rashida Bumbray, director of culture and art at the Open Society Foundations, with curatorial advisors Saidiya Hartman, a professor at Columbia University in New York City; and Tina Campt, professor at Brown University in Providence, R.I.
Key themes include maroonage, magical realism, and medicine. The event “continues [Leigh’s] work of making Black women’s intellectual labor more visible,” Bumbray said. “‘Loophole’ will elevate a global conversation on Black feminist thought in order to nurture the intergenerational and interdisciplinary connections between Black women thinkers and makers.”
The artist’s inspirations reflect the African diaspora, from 19th-century West African art to colonial history, and will become all the more resonant in Venice, given its long history of intercontinental trade and cultural exchange. Her presentation will feature a new series of figurative sculptures representing Black women in bronze and ceramic, including works that Leigh is making at a Philadelphia foundry.
Simone Leigh. Photo: Shaniqwa Jarvis.
“Most artists who have the opportunity to work in large-scale bronze will make a cast in clay that then the bronze foundry will scale up to cast into bronze,” explained Eva Respini, the ICA’s chief curator. “Simone is working with the clay models at 100 percent scale, which is incredibly rare…her hand touches everything, and the result of her hand being present in all stages of the process of making is that the works are extremely resonant in person. The attention to every detail, every surface, translates to works that are once personal and human.”
The exhibition’s title is meant to evoke the dual meanings of “grit,” both the physical quality of sand but also the spirit of resolve and determination even in the face of obstacles. More specifically, “grittin” is an African American Vernacular English term that means adopting a posture of protection. For Leigh, it represents the perseverance and stoicism embodied by her figures, as well as the earthen materials she uses to make them.
Following the conclusion of the biennale in November, the pavilion’s contents will be packed up and shipped to Boston, where the ICA will host Leigh’s first museum survey, opening in 2023 and subsequently touring to other venues across the U.S.
Leigh signed last week with New York’s Matthew Marks Gallery after an abrupt split from mega-dealer Hauser and Wirth last month.
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Jamilah Sabur approaches her artistic practice the same way a mathematician solves an unproven theorem: through a slow, methodical “long exploration,” as she calls it, done over many years.
Since her time as an undergrad, “it feels like I’ve been working through the same thing,” Sabur says. “It’s like this one, continuous [line where] everything folds into itself.” And it will take her “50 or 60 years,” she guesses, to really make sense of what that thing is. So at the age of 34, the artist is only just getting started.
Given the depth of Sabur’s conceptual preoccupations, it is no surprise that she refuses to confine herself to one medium. She once said she has “an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach,” putting “every damn thing in there like a mind map.”
Early in her career—around the time she was working on an MFA degree at UC San Diego— she was dabbling in experimental filmmaking, but Sabur refuses to be hogtied to the genre. Two years after her debut solo show at Miami-based Nina Johnson Gallery, which featured a series of sculptural wall pieces, her latest exhibition there, “DADA Holdings,” focuses on paintings and should be considered in tandem with Bulk Pangaea, Sabur’s video installation in this year’s edition of Prospect New Orleans. Her work has also been included in “The Willfulness of Objects,” a group show featuring works by an all-star line-up of artists from the Bass Collection in Miami Beach.
Jamilah Sabur, Ust Luga (2021).
Given the back-to-back culmination of these projects, Sabur admits to feeling a bit frazzled; she feels like she’s now “deep underwater.” The reference seems fitting given how strongly geology factors into her practice. Sabur often uses science as an entry point for examinations into the social, political, and climate conditions throughout history of any given place. And according to Sabur, her latest projects—the paintings and the video installation—are about “the relationship between colonial and postcolonial extraction.”
For her installation at Prospect, Sabur, who was born in Jamaica in 1987, started by asking herself, “Well, what is the geology of New Orleans?” That simple query set off a series of discoveries that tied New Orleans to Jamaica—and incorporated Belgium through the image of an escarpment (a cliff or steep slope), which the Belgian army once used to defeat Napoleon, just as freed African slaves living in Jamaica had against the British almost a century early.
Sabur’s explorations started with the Michaud fault, a geological formation that runs underneath the eastern part of New Orleans. Through her research, Sabur then learned that NASA builds their rockets in a manufacturing facility located directly on the fault. And what are the rockets made from? Aluminum. Wondering where the aluminum came from, Sabur found out that it was partially supplied from Jamaica, where she lived until she was 4 years old.
Sabur then traveled to Jamaica to film the aluminum mine, the mountainous rainforest surrounding it—where enslaved workers once attempted to escape from British and Spanish colonizers—and the ship that exports the natural resource to Louisiana.
Jamilah Sabur, In this Act (2021).
Converting stills from Bulk Pangaea into stereoscopic images, Sabur’s paintings and text works in “DADA Holdings” are an “object-base[d] exploration,” she says, of the same themes. The works reference the Jamaican mining act of 1950, which cemented the island’s role as the major supplier of aluminum to North America. Continuing her deep dives into “networks of extraction across the planet,” she explained in an email, Sabur feels as though “the actual sites of extraction are just the shadows of what has already happened.”
To that end, this work is, for one, “a commentary on how this extraction of natural resources is very similar to the colonization of certain spaces, and her thinking about the impact of both extraction and colonization on indigenous people” Erin Christovale, the Hammer Museum curator who organized her first major solo museum presentation in 2019, told Artnet News.
Jamilah Sabur, Black Forest, Bauxite, Black Sea (2021).
Clicking Into Place
Sabur’s exhibition at the Hammer was her breakout moment. Familiar with her work since visiting her 2014 thesis show at UC San Diego, Christovale felt like Sabur’s films “always needed to branch out, to be multi-dimensional and function more as an installation or an environment.” So the curator let Sabur take over the Hammer’s project space with Un chemin escarpé (“a steep path”), an immersive, five-channel video installation.
The work is something that viewers “can really inhabit,” Sabur said, rather than simply just watch, and the videos mainly show landscape images, with no linear narrative or dialogue, only a score the artist herself composed. The installation is also a sort of precursor to Bulk Pangaea now on view at Prospect, mining “geographical spaces as a way to think through colonization, environmental justice, and the politics of immigration,” as Christovale noted in her announcement of the show on Instagram.
Prospect curator Diana Nawi has been following the evolution of Sabur’s practice for nearly a decade. Of late, she feels as though “Jamilah has landed on forms and ideas that I think can really carry her through her practice for a long time,” she said. “They’re timeless but also so relevant to our moment.”
Jamilah Sabur, Nord Stream (2021).
In the last few years, her “ideas around place, science, geography, and geology have become more expansive within her practice,” she continued. “I think her Hammer Project and what she’s done for Prospect both really speak to that.”
Her piece for Prospect, in particular, is also deeply personal. Incorporating images of various Jamaican landscapes, along with the symbolic use of the rhomboid shape—a reference to the threshold of her mother’s old home on the island—Sabur not only leans into her history as a citizen living primarily outside of her home country, but also addresses the idea of feeling stuck between two places.
She also utilizes her background in performance, engaging in deliberate, ritualized movements in the videos, which give viewers the sense they’re not only inhabiting the installation space, but also crossing through a portal into Sabur’s innermost psyche.
What Christovale was immediately drawn to in Sabur’s videos was how they “really challenged what you assume of a Black experimental video artist,” she says, in that “there’s a very specific Black American history [with] various signifiers that are not really expressed or seen in her work.”
Instead, Sabur re-centers Black history through a primarily Caribbean lens, “often pulling from landscapes and ideas and languages that are not American, but that obviously have direct ties to her personal history,” Christovale adds. “So it doesn’t always quite register as an American work.”
Jamilah Sabur, Cockpit Country (British Army base 1728-1795) (2021)
The Perpetual Outsider
Sabur’s work doesn’t register as American for a reason—until recently, she wasn’t one. After moving from Jamaica to Miami with her family, she grew up as an undocumented immigrant, only obtaining her American citizenship in 2018. Her personal struggles with “feeling stateless,” as she put it, have been significant.
In that way, she has often felt like she doesn’t quite belong to either culture. Ultimately, much of her Jamaican identity “has been formed in this relationship to memory, my parents retelling of this landscape of this place,” she said.
In Un chemin escarpé, she uses memory as a way to see “a landscape from another vantage point,” she wrote in an email, scrutinizing how bodies move through and encompass multiple dimensions in time and space.
Sabur creates her art as someone whose perspective isn’t clouded by any ties or allegiances, as though she’s removed enough to be an objective observer, someone attempting to provide answers to questions that those steeped in a single cultural heritage don’t even think to ask.
After getting her BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2009, she considers her time in grad school at UC San Diego as a real turning point in her practice.
“I went there following the legacy of Allan Kaprow and Lorna Simpson,” she says. What she found “was this program rooted in these conceptual practices”.
That experience continues to shape her thinking, and has led to what ultimately keeps her practice going: the search. Which she is only a fraction of the way into. Similar to how she goes about her work, Sabur takes a bird’s-eye view of her practice as a whole. When asked how she wants it to grow, she wrote: “I just plan to continue this evolution of thought.”
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British artist Lubaina Himid was awarded the Turner Prize in 2017 and since then has been a quietly powerful presence in the art world.
In 2019, she exhibited at the New Museum in New York and then at Wiels in Brussels in 2020. Now, in a homecoming moment, she has opened an eponymous survey of her work at Tate Modern. Featuring paintings, sculptures, installations, and sound works, the show lifts the lid on Himid’s practice beyond the most recent paintings for which she’s best known, revealing the journey that brought her to this point.
“I suppose the last few years have been full of those sorts of things—not big risks, but those sorts of risks where it could go wrong, but where I discovered all sorts of things about myself,” Himid mused as we spoke at Tate Modern.
The pandemic was an opportunity to slow down, she said. But it was also a chance to focus on painting and thinking about art after a whirlwind year that saw her on the frontline of debates about media representation, culminating in an unorthodox residency with the Guardian newspaper after she accused its staff of enforcing racial biases.
“It gave me a chance to make a particular kind of painting and to do this collaboration that I did with Magda,” she said, referring to sound and film artist Magda Stawarska-Beavan.
The resulting collaborative show at Wiels last year (“Lubaina Himid: Risquons-Toutwith”), which explored the color blue, its senses and its meanings, was inspired by the Joni Mitchell album Blue. Some of the show is also part of the Tate Modern exhibition, the sound design of which took place ahead of the curation of the rest of the work, providing a framework for the visual works in the show. The sound flows and bleeds from room to room, much like the sea, which is a theme throughout the show.
Lubaina Himid, Blue Grid Test (2020) at Wiels. Photo © Lubaina Himid
“What Magda and the sound the team did was sort of compose the whole space at once,” Himid said. “I think what it allows is audiences to go at a particular pace. You’re pulled [through], but you still have the memory in your body. You certainly have it because you can still just hear what’s behind you, but there is something else pulling you through.”
In a sound work titled Blue Grid Test (2020), the soothing recital of “blue, blau, bleu,” with poetic evocations of the color blue, wrap the viewer in calm. But then you step out into open water, into the sound of the unrelenting movement of the ocean filling the next, huge room.
Lubaina Himid, Tide Change (1998). Photo © Lubaina Himid Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens
“When you leave The Blue Grid Test, that was the innocence for lost, safe space. But we gave you that and then you’re out in the open, where everything is dangerous. Then when you reach [a] big square, and you’ve got old boats, new money. A boat, a wave, the shore—the history of the capturing of Africans and the shipping of Africans.”
Lubaina Himid, Man in a Shirt Drawer (2017–18). Photo Courtesy Tate © Lubaina Himid
The show explodes in a later room with huge, beautiful paintings of figures in discussion. But somehow, their interior worlds speak more loudly than their gestures. There is tension in each painting, as though we have just missed something, or as if something pivotal will happen the moment we walk by.
Two series dominate the selection. First is the “Pastry Chefs,” which deals with the inner dialogue and outer behavior of men, and the power dynamics they negotiate.
“If you imagine, all day long, these men are in a fast and beautiful kitchen making fabulous creations of spun sugar and chocolate,” she said. “It’s not necessary, but it’s kind of fabulous.”
Lubaina Himid at Tate Modern. Photo Sonal Bakrania Courtesy Tate
The second series is the “Le Rodeur,” in which Himid imagines life on a fabled ship that came from West Africa to the Caribbean on which nearly everyone went blind. Upon arriving at their destination, an indigenous Caribbean tribe cured their sight. But who were the lucky ones, Himid asks? The ones who arrived to enslavement, or the one who were thrown into the sea on the way?
“They don’t know what’s happening,” Himid said of the newly arrived enslaved men and women. “They don’t know where they are. They don’t know what the sea is. They don’t know what boats are. They don’t know whether they’re going to hell. They knew nothing—and on top of that, they’re going blind. And top of that, some of them, in their blindness, are being thrown overboard.”
Lubaina Himid at Tate Modern. Photo Sonal Bakrania Courtesy Tate
Himid intends these works and the entire show to raise more questions than it answers. She sees the non-chronological order as a risk worth taking. The works ask monumental questions of the viewer, but their vivid beauty—they are great paintings—hold you in a safe place as you contemplate them.
Throughout the show are sails, pulleys, ropes, and waters, a constant theme of balance and navigation, the ever-moving waters and shifting sands of an identity thrown into chaos by a cataclysmic event.
The show ends on a stark note, with a sound work in which the names of slaves are spoken aloud, accompanied by music with a connection to Blackness from Baroque to jazz. Nearby are a haunting sculpture, an empty bike, and smoking shelter graffitied with the phrase, “Do you want an easy life?” It’s a cliffhanger of an ending to what is essentially a show filled with emotion.
“You have a shot at Tate Modern and then the temptation is to absolutely play it safe and play the same formula, because we know what works,” Himid said. “You know, start chronologically, go through the career, and end up with your recent work. But that’s not quite the way I think, or the way I work. It’s all, for me, about pushing things a little bit within the confines of a museum or an art gallery or within visual arts.”
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