the young people's professor

Brooklyn-based, black feminist artist Simone Leigh is a relative "new comer" to the art world, but she's quickly ascending to the art scene's funky, fresh talented tenth. Her conceptual sculptures draw on ethnographic and anthropological tropes as a way of critiquing representations of the black female body in contemporary visual and popular culture.

Her brilliant “Hottentot Venus Series” explores the disturbing legacy of Sarah Baartman, the nineteenth century South African woman whose body was exhibited around Europe as a bizarre circus act. Leigh re-scripts this history in works such as "Fetish Object with Workboot Scarification," --a sculpted buttocks and breast-shaped object covered with a chocolate-brown base.

Other art-works in Leigh's oeuvre deal with African diaspora material cultures and with the history of Ota Benga, a Congolese man who was exhibited with monkeys in a cage at the Bronx Zoo in 1906.

Leigh's current show "Defense Mechanisms" (a collaborative installation that aestheticizes slave ship iconography) is on view in the exhibit Intersections at downtown Manhattan's Aaron Arts Center/Henry Street Settlement from June 5-July 20, 2007.

www.simoneleigh.com