Simone Leigh

Simone Leigh’s Opuwo, named after a town in Namibia, features the ceramic head of a woman whose unarticulated eyes refuse the viewer’s gaze. Her hair is styled in a puff made up of small porcelain roses. Her conical raffia skirt references the huts and skirts of the Herero, an ethnic group in Namibia and Angola. Between 1904 and 1907, German colonizers killed tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people in what is now considered the first genocide campaign of the 20th century. Leigh describes her sculptures as representing women “who, for whatever reasons, have been left out of the archive or left out of history.”