“Simone Leigh: The Waiting Room” will mark a new chapter in artist Simone Leigh’s ongoing exploration of black subjectivities, particularly those of women.
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In her work, Leigh (b. 1968, Chicago, IL) demands that the concerns, roles, and rights of women of color are recognized as central, rather than pushed to the margins. Her exhibition and residency at the New Museum will consider the possibilities of disobedience, desire, and self-determination as they manifest in resistance to an imposed state of deferral and debasement. Whereas discourses of patience, pragmatism, and austerity often underscore political debates surrounding the failures of public health care and related conditions, Leigh finds inspiration in parallel histories of urgency, agency, and intervention within social movements and black communities, past and present. Troubling the notion of separate narratives, she implicates violent, institutionalized control and indifference as the conditions under which forms of self care and social care can become radical or alternative.
Focusing specifically on an expanded notion of medicine, “The Waiting Room” will reference a wide range of care environments and opportunities—from herbalist apothecaries, to muthi [medicine] markets in Durban, South Africa, to meditation rooms, to movement studios—and will involve a range of public and private workshops and healing treatments. Blurring the distinction between bodily and spiritual health, or between wellness and happiness—and, in doing so, countering the perception of holistic care as a luxury good—Leigh will convene practitioners who view social justice as integral to their work. The project will also take into account a history of social inequalities that have necessitated community-organized care, traditionally provided by women, from the United Order of Tents, a secret society of nurses active since the Underground Railroad, to volunteers in the Black Panther Party’s embattled clinics active from the 1960s to the 1980s. “The Waiting Room” will suggest that creating a space for wellness may require both the making of a sanctuary and an act of disobedience against the systematic enactment and repudiation of black pain.
This project developed out of an earlier iteration of Leigh’s socially engaged workFree People’s Medical Clinic (2014), organized by Creative Time, which provided free treatments and workshops over the course of four weekends in the former Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, home of Dr. Josephine English, the first black ob-gyn in the state of New York. At the New Museum, Leigh will continue her involvement with professionals in the field of holistic health, while creating a new installation and a private, “underground” series of intimate, in-depth workshops and classes for community partners to take place while the Museum is closed to the public. Additionally, a series of talks, performances, and events conceptualized as medicinal dialogues on aging, disobedience, abortion, healing performances, and toxicity will be offered throughout Leigh’s residency.
“The Waiting Room” will inaugurate the Department of Education and Public Engagement’s annual R&D (Research and Development) Summers, a series of R&D Seasons that expressly aims to underscore the New Museum’s year-round commitment to community partnerships and to public dialogue at the intersection of art and social justice. Each R&D Summer will take the form of a residency and an exhibition.
The exhibition is curated by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement; Shaun Leonardo, Manager of School, Youth, and Community Programs; and Emily Mello, Associate Director of Education.
Simone Leigh was born in Chicago in 1968 and lives and works in New York. Her recent and upcoming solo presentations include “Hammer Projects: Simone Leigh,” the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); “Simone Leigh: I ran to the rock to hide my face the rock cried out no hiding place,” the Kansas City Art Institute (2016); “Free People’s Medical Clinic,” created with Creative Time (2014); “Gone South,” the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2014); and “You Don’t Know Where Her Mouth Has Been,” the Kitchen, New York (2012). In 2016, Leigh received A Blade of Grass Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. She has also received grants and awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Creative Capital, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Art Matters, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Leigh was an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem from 2010 to 2011 and the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program in 2009. She was a facilitator of the International Art Programme at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2012 and at the Àsìkò School, Dakar, Senegal, in 2013.
CARE SESSIONS
All care sessions will be offered free of charge and will take place on the Fifth Floor. Same-day sign-up in the New Museum Lobby is required to attend. Please check the event calendar for more information.
Afrocentering with Aimee Meredith Cox
Saturdays: June 25, July 23, August 6, August 27, September 17, 11:30 AM–12:30 PM
Thursdays: July 14, July 28, August 18, August 25, 7–8:30 PM
Massage with Malik K. Bellamy
Sundays: June 26, July 3, July 24, August 2, September 4, September 18, 1–4 PM
Community Acupuncture with Julia Bennett
Thursdays: July 7, August 11, September 8, 6–9 PM
Saturdays: July 16, August 13, September 10, 4–6 PM
Herbalism: Learning How to Heal Yourself with Plants
Six-Week Herbalism Course with Karen Rose
Saturdays: July 9, July 16, July 23, July 30, August 6, August 13, 2–3 PM
Herbalism: Learning How to Heal Yourself with Plants
Gallery Talk with Karen Rose
Thursday July 21, 7 PM
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
Please check the event calendar for more details.
Rashida Bumbray: Motherless Child Set
Thursday June 23, 5–7 PM
To celebrate the opening of “Simone Leigh: The Waiting Room,” curator and choreographer Rashida Bumbray and guests will perform a cycle of black folk songs during this event.
Chitra Ganesh: On Disobedience
Thursday June 30, 7 PM
For this lecture, artist Chitra Ganesh will explore the notion of disobedience as it has been mobilized in political protest and social movements outside of the United States.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Remedios: Performance Rituals as Healing
Saturday July 23, 3 PM
In this program, artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons will negotiate narratives of pain, loss, and resilience through a performative meditation on survival, in which she will reimagine herself in a time of societal and geopolitical transitions.
Lorraine O’Grady: Ask Me Anything About Aging
Thursday August 4, 7 PM
Considering the benefits of intergenerational word-of-mouth information and strategy sharing among women, artist Lorraine O’Grady will field questions about aging from the audience joining her for this intimate conversation.
On Abortion: A Conversation in Conjunction with
“Simone Leigh: The Waiting Room”
Thursday September 1, 7 PM
During her residency at the New Museum, Simone Leigh will organize an event addressing historic and contemporary narratives surrounding the reproductive health and rights of black women through dialogue with invited guests.
Vanessa Agard-Jones: On Toxicity
Saturday September 10, 3 PM
Anthropologist Vanessa Agard-Jones will discuss her forthcoming book,Body Burdens: Toxic Endurance and Decolonial Desire in the French Atlantic, which considers pesticides, sexual politics, and postcoloniality in Martinique.
below: Simone Leigh, Landscape, from the series Anatomy of Architecture, 2016. Digital collage.
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