Simone Leigh is a celebrated contemporary African-American artist. Working with ceramics, video, installation, and bronze, her art explores issues of identity, race, beauty, and feminism. Like her peer Kara Walker, Leigh’s artworks incorporate materials and forms traditionally associated with African art and the African diaspora as seen in her monumental Brick House (2019). “I am compelled by this idea that the artistic form is as important as the information the form delivers,” the artist has explained. “In Western cultures there is a stated separation between style and substance; there is an idea of the object and the decoration. Black aesthetics deny this separation.” Born in 1967 in Chicago, IL, she went on to earn her BA in art with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College. Leigh’s career gained widespread attention in 2016, when her work was featured at the Art Show in the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Her work has since been featured in the New Museum in an exhibition titled “The Waiting Room,”  the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Studio Museum in Harlem with the project “inHarlem,” the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and the 2022 Venice Biennale. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Today, Leigh’s works are included in the collections of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., among others.