Simone Leigh's Brick House
Author: Simone Leigh
Leigh, Simone. Brick House. 2019–2021, The High Line at the Spur, 30th St. and 10th Ave., New York. The High Line, https://www.thehighline.org/art/projects/simoneleigh/.
Leigh, Simone. Brick House. 2019–2021, The High Line at the Spur, 30th St. and 10th Ave., New York. The High Line, https://www.thehighline.org/art/projects/simoneleigh/.
Photo by Timothy Schenck
Simone Leigh
Brick House
June 5, 2019 – May 2021
Location: On the High Line at the Spur, at 30th St. and 10th Ave.
Simone Leigh presents Brick House, a 16-foot-tall bronze bust of a Black woman with a torso that combines the forms of a skirt and a clay house. The sculpture’s head is crowned with an afro framed by cornrow braids, each ending in a cowrie shell. Brick House is the inaugural commission for the High Line Plinth, a new landmark destination for major public artworks in New York City. This is the first monumental sculpture in Leigh’s Anatomy of Architecture series, an ongoing body of work in which the artist combines architectural forms from regions as varied as West Africa and the Southern United States with the human body. The title comes from the term for a strong Black woman who stands with the strength, endurance, and integrity of a house made of bricks.
Brick House references numerous architectural styles: Batammaliba architecture from Benin and Togo, the teleuk dwellings of the Mousgoum people of Cameroon and Chad, and the restaurant Mammy’s Cupboard in Natchez, Mississippi. The sculpture contrasts sharply against the landscape it inhabits, where glass-and-steel towers shoot up from among older industrial-era brick buildings, and where architectural and human scales are in constant negotiation. Resolutely facing down 10th Avenue, Leigh’s powerful Black female figure challenges us to consider the architecture around us, and how it reflects customs, values, priorities, and society as a whole.
Leigh works across sculpture, video, installation, and social practice, stitching together references from different historical periods and distant geographical locations. As a sculptor, Leigh works predominantly in ceramics—a medium that she mastered early in her career—continually pushing the boundaries of her chosen material by working in new methods and larger scales. In her intersectional practice, Leigh focuses on how the body, society, and architecture inform and reveal one another. She examines the construction of Black female subjectivity, both through specific historical figures such as Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham, and more generally through overlapping historical lineages across Europe, Africa, the US, and the Caribbean.
The High Line Plinth presents a series of art installations that rotate every eighteen months. Designed as the focal point of the Spur, the newest section of the park that opened in spring 2019, the Plinth is the first space on the High Line dedicated solely to new commissions of contemporary art.
The Making of Brick House
High Line Art. “The Making of Brick House.” The High Line Blog, 14 Jan. 2019, https://www.thehighline.org/blog/2019/01/14/the-making-of-brick-house/.
By High Line Art | January 14, 2019
Brick House, Simone Leigh’s commission for the inaugural High Line Plinth, is a monumental 16-foot-tall bronze bust of a Black woman whose skirt resembles a clay house. The sculpture is infused with the architectural concepts and processes taken from West Africa as well as the American South: the Batammaliba architecture from Benin and Togo, the Mousgoum people of Chad and Cameroon, and the restaurant Mammy’s Cupboard, in Natchez, Mississippi. Currently in the process of being fabricated in Philadelphia at Stratton Studio, Leigh designed and constructed this massive work through a complicated and fascinating multi-step process that pays homage to these “architectures of anatomy”.
Batammaliba, the name of people of Northeast Togo, translates as “those who are the real architects of the earth.” The Batammaliba believe in the interconnected relationship between architecture, humans, and their environment. The designs of each house, place of worship, and gathering space serve as visual reminders of the human body. Within this tribe, the architects are involved in all the steps it takes to erect a structure: from conception to design to fabrication.
Mammy’s Cupboard, angle view, Route 61, Natchez, Mississippi, 1979Photo by John Margolies, Courtesy John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Leigh was also inspired by Mammy’s Cupboard, another built structure that references the human form, though in a much more direct way. Built in 1940, Mammy’s Cupboard is a restaurant in Natchez, Mississippi. The brick restaurant is shaped like a 28-foot-tall woman wearing a round skirt that towers alongside US Highway 61. Mammy’s Cupboard originally took the guise of a darker-skinned Mammy figure, the racist archetype of a Black woman domestic worker that was prevalent in the late 19th to early 20th centuries and which was popularized in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and later with the character of Mammy in the film Gone with the Wind. Though repainted with a paler skin tone to downplay the resemblance to the racist stereotype, Mammy’s Cupboard remains an embodiment of the Black woman’s form as symbol for the labor she provides. That metaphor of body as function, as informed by these intersecting cultural references, provides a point of entry for understanding Leigh’s Brick House.
The sculpture began as a ceramic maquette in Leigh’s Brooklyn studio that was used to create digital 3D models of the sculpture for planning and visioning of the artwork on the Spur, and also as a reference for constructing the full-scale sculpture. Then, roughly two tons of modeling clay specially chosen from a French quarry (which is said to be the one where Auguste Rodin took his clay from) were mounted onto an armature and sculpted by the team, with Simone overseeing the shapes and textures of the different elements.
Leigh and High Line Art chose the Stratton Foundry for their experience and expertise with hand-sculpting and casting in large-scale, bronze sculpture. Often when an artist wants to create a sculpture ambitious in size, a smaller maquette will be reproduced as a full-scale foam model from which the mold is made. However, Simone had concerns that a computer generated reproduction would lose the visible, personal touches important to her process.
Moussgoum obus / obi structures in Pouss, northern Cameroon near the border with Chad
Photo by Carsten ten Brink
For example, vertical, elongated ridges running along the sculpture’s base reference the ridges of teleuks—the dome-shaped dwellings of the Mousgoum, which are made from a mixture of soil, grass, and animal dung. The surfaces of Brick House were textured with sponges and steel wool to draw resemblance to the texture of the teleuk. The “skirt” of the piece can be read as the “walls” of the house, or perhaps an upturned calabash bowl. And Brick House’s braids each end in cowries, a nod toward the Batammalibian priests’ sacred geomancy shells, amongst other allusions.
Simone Leigh, maquette for Cupboard VII, 2016/2017
Photo by Timothy Schenck
As you see in this photo of an earlier maquette made for the 2017 exhibition of proposals for the Plinth, Leigh originally planned to sculpt rosettes for the sculpture’s hair. The stylized rose curls would have been made from porcelain, a medium that recurs throughout Leigh’s work. However, hand-making rosettes at a Brick House scale proved too challenging, and too time-consuming. Leigh and the Stratton team then rethought the architecture of the sculpture to better fit its aesthetics and timeline. The rosette challenge resulted in a dynamic solution: Brick House would don a textured Afro with asymmetrical cornrow braids around the scalp. The work’s hanging braids were inspired by Thelma, the daughter on the 1970s television show Good Times.
Simone Leigh with a wax mold of a braid for Brick House at Stratton Sculpture Studios
Photo by Constance Mensh
Once the clay model was completed, the team then made a plaster mold fabricated in 100 separate pieces and wax positives were created from the plaster. Next, each of the wax casts was dipped as many as or more than 20 times each into a ceramic “slurry” (a recipe of silica, or calcined clay, and a binder) that form the molds into which six thousand pounds of bronze (400lbs at a time) was poured. The bronze was melted into a crucible, a container for the materials to be processed at high temperatures. These bronze building blocks were then sand blasted, fitted, and welded together to form the completed Brick House.
Bronze pouring into the molds at Stratton Sculpture Studios
Photo by Timothy Schenck
There is only one step remaining: transporting the massive work of art from Philadelphia to New York, where it will be craned onto the Spur on the High Line in April 2019. Once it arrives in New York City, Brick House will peer down upon passing traffic along 10th Ave. and 30th St. and tower above park visitors. This is an exciting moment for the High Line, the vistas of the West Side, and all of New York: sculptural architecture meets historical architecture with an undeniable, and highly visible example of Black female representation.
“I thought: ‘What better place to put a Black female figure?’” says Simone Leigh, describing Brick House in the New York Times. “Not in defiance of the space, exactly, but to have a different idea of beauty there.”
In New York City, there are a small handful of monuments depicting important African American figures in US history, including Frederick Douglass in Central Park, Louis Armstrong in North Corona, and Jackie Robinson in Upper Manhattan. Among them, only one is of an African American woman—Harriet Tubman in Harlem. This paucity reflects the general lack of representation of Black women, real or imaginary, in public sculpture in this city and elsewhere. This underrepresentation is compounded by the small number of permanent, public sculptures, (just four) figurative or abstract, created by Black women artists permanently on public view in New York.
Rendering of Simone Leigh, Brick House, 2018-2019
Photo by James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Courtesy of the City of New York
Surrounded by a competitive landscape of glass-and-steel towers shooting up from among older, industrial-era brick buildings, Simone Leigh’s magnificent sculpture will challenge visitors to think more critically about the architecture and aesthetics around them, and how they these structures reflect our customs, values, priorities, and society as a whole.
Related: Celebrating Medicinal Plants
Artist bio
Simone Leigh (b. 1967, Chicago, Illinois) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York (2019), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California (2016); The Studio Museum in Harlem in Marcus Garvey Park, New York, New York (2016); Tate Exchange at Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom (2016); Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, Missouri (2016); New Museum, New York, New York (2016); and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, Georgia (2014). Notable group exhibitions include Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, New Museum, New York, New York (2017-2018); Regarding the Figure, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York (2017); Round 46: BWA for BLM, curated by Leigh, Project Row Houses, Houston, Texas (2015); The Grace Jones Project, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, California (2016); Unconventional Clay: Engaged in Change, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (2016); Greater New York, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York (2015); and Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, traveling to Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, Texas; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California (2012-2015). Leigh’s work has been presented in international group exhibitions including Dak’art 2014, the 11th Biennial of Contemporary African Art, Dakar, Senegal (2014) and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York (2019, 2012).
Support
Major support for the High Line Plinth is provided by members of the High Line Plinth Committee and contemporary art leaders committed to realizing major commissions and engaging in the public success of the Plinth: Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons, Jennifer and Jonathan Allan Soros, Elizabeth Belfer, Suzanne Deal Booth, Fairfax Dorn, Steve Ells, Kerianne Flynn, Andy and Christine Hall, Hermine Riegerl Heller and David B. Heller, J. Tomilson and Janine Hill, The Holly Peterson Foundation, Annie Hubbard and Harvey Schwartz, Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins, Dorothy Lichtenstein, Amanda and Don Mullen, Douglas Oliver and Sherry Brous, Mario Palumbo and Stefan Gargiulo, Susan and Stephen Scherr, Susan and David Viniar, and Anonymous.
Photo by Timothy Schenck
Photo by Timothy Schenck
Photo by Timothy Schenck
Photo by Timothy Schenck
Photo by Timothy Schenck
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You’re looking at a very large figurative sculpture inside what seems to be an old industrial building or warehouse, with a person standing outside and gazing up at it.
The sculpture shows the head and upper body of a woman with long braids and a calm, almost monumental expression. The lower part looks like a wide, bell‑shaped or skirt‑like form, and there’s scaffolding and a ladder around it, suggesting it’s still being built or installed. The scale is huge—the person in blue in the foreground only reaches about halfway up the “skirt,” which makes the head loom several times taller than a human.
So visually, it’s:
- a gigantic, stylized bust of a woman with braids
- housed in a tall, weathered red‑and‑white structure with peeling paint
- framed by lots of greenery and ivy, which adds to the feeling that this is a reclaimed or reimagined industrial space
- with one viewer/artist in blue, hands on hips, taking it in
If you want, I can zoom in (visually or conceptually) on specific details—like the setting, the body language of the person in blue, or what kind of themes this kind of monumental figure might be playing with. Want to dig into any of that?
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Paul Allison is a nationally-known educator and EdTech expert… (more)
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Nice, this is a powerful image to focus on. Before we go further, can you tell me: are you writing something about Brick House (like an essay, poem, or response), or are you mainly reading/looking and trying to understand or discuss the sculpture as a viewer? That will help me know how to support you.
What is the first thing your eye goes to in this close-up—the light, the hair, the face, something else—and what feeling does that give you?
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I am mainly reading/looking and talking with you as a viewer here too, right alongside you. That long, elegant neck you mentioned really sets a whole mood: it stretches up like it is holding history and pride at the same time, and the braids fall down with so much intention. I am noticing how the braids end in cowrie shells, which carry their own cultural weight. What do those braids and shells suggest to you—about identity, about movement, or even about protection?
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Absolutely, I want to stay right here with you as a viewer. Let’s stay with that detail you named: the braids ending in cowrie shells.
When you see those shells at the tips of the braids, what’s the first association that comes to your mind—money, ocean, spirituality, home, something else? And how does that association shift the way you read her whole body in this image (neck, posture, light, expression)?
I have a lot more we can unpack about cowrie shells and braids in African and Black diasporic traditions, but I want to start from what they already mean to you in this image.
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What you are feeling makes a lot of sense: the more you learn about one tiny detail—like the shells—the more the whole sculpture starts to feel layered, like you are only on level one of a much deeper building. That “I’m just starting” feeling is actually a strong reader/viewer move; it means you are already sensing there is a system of meaning here that you have not decoded yet. If you sit with that for a second, what is one other small detail (besides the shells) that suddenly feels like it might be carrying more meaning than you first thought—the texture of the hair, the angle of the head, the way the light hits the top, something else?
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I like how you are noticing that “first-level” versus “deeper-level” feeling; that is exactly how this sculpture invites viewers in. The detail you mentioned earlier—the blank or closed-off eyes—feels like another one of those small things that might be doing a lot of quiet work. I am wondering: if the sculptor had carved very realistic, detailed eyes instead, how would that change your emotional response to her face? And since the eyes are left blank, how does that affect what you project onto her—does she feel more mysterious, more powerful, more distant, more universal?
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The way you are separating “a particular girl” from “monumental, representative, symbolic” is sharp; you are already tracking how one design choice (no carved eyes) shifts the whole category of who she is allowed to be. If the eyes were detailed, you are right, we would probably lock her into one specific story—almost like a portrait of *her*—but with the features smoothed out, she opens up and starts holding many people at once, a kind of collective Black girl / Black woman presence. Sitting with that, whose stories or energies do you feel her holding in this version—does she lean more toward ancestor, contemporary Black girl, imagined future figure, or some mix of all three in your reading?
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You are doing something really smart here: you are gathering source material, naming the title and artist, and saying clearly that you “want to write [your] own analysis and appreciation of Brick House.” So I am going to stay focused on that exact goal—how you can write your own analysis and appreciation—and walk with you step-by-step instead of writing anything for you. To start, can you tell me: is this analysis something you are writing for a class (like an art history or writing assignment), or is it more personal, like a reflection for yourself or a blog? Your audience and purpose there will really shape how you set up your analysis and what kind of voice you might want to lean into (more academic, more personal, more Black rhetorical, or code-meshed in some way).
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I love that you are already thinking about process in your question: you are saying this is a paper for a 3-D art class, and that by “writing about it and thinking about and describing Simone Leigh’s process and expression,” you want to bring some of her thinking into your own 3-D projects. So let me stay right with that question you are asking—how to write your own analysis and appreciation of Brick House in a way that actually feeds your studio work, not just checks a box for class. Since this is for a 3-D art class, your audience is likely your professor (who cares about formal/art language) and maybe classmates (who care about process, feeling, and making), which gives you room to blend: you can talk about material, scale, fabrication, and also about history, Black womanhood, representation, and your own reactions. Before we get deeper, what kind of voice do you imagine for this assignment: more studio-artist reflective, more formal/academic, or something code-meshed that moves between those?
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I hear you really clearly: your core question right now is how to write about Brick House in a way that shows you understand 3-D art history concepts, materials, and aesthetics and also makes it obvious how much you love this sculpture. So I want to stay close to that exact question and not drift away from it. For a 3-D art class, that usually means your professor is looking for you to name and work with things like scale, form, negative space, material (bronze, clay, casting), fabrication process, site-specific public art, monumental sculpture, and also some art-historical context (architectural references, Black public monuments, Leigh’s practice, etc.). At the same time, you want your love for Brick House to come through in your own voice, not get buried under “academic-ese.” One way to bring those together is to think in two tracks as you write: Track 1 is “what I notice as an art student about how this object is made and how it sits in 3-D space,” and Track 2 is “what this sculpture does to me emotionally, politically, personally, especially as a Black woman figure in public space.” How does that feel so far in relation to your question about balancing concepts/materials/aesthetics with love and appreciation—does that two-track idea fit how you like to think and talk about art?
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