A presentation on the practices of mothering in the work of American artist Simone Leigh.
Installation view, The Hugo Boss Prize 2018: Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat, Guggenheim Museum, New York.
“The world was interested in shaming me at every turn for being an artist and a mother at the same time,” Simone Leigh recently recalled. In Leigh’s sculptural and social practice work, mothering extends multi-directionally across generations and horizontally, even sisterly, to her chosen communities. Such a plurality of “othermothers” is always tempered by refusal, proving that as both a political position and an aesthetic choice, refusal is also an act of mothering. This talk considers Leigh’s sculptural installation for her 2019 exhibition at New York's Guggenheim Museum, The Hugo Boss Prize 2018: Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat. How to closely read these sculptures while attending to their refusals and opacities, as well as the spaces of intimacy and collectivity that Leigh maintains and protects for Black women, is an unresolvable tension animating this paper.
Part of the Art History Seminar Series, convened by Mary Roberts, and presented by the discipline of art history at the University of Sydney, with support from the Power Institute.
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Tara McDowell
Tara McDowell is Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include contemporary curating, exhibition histories, art institutions, feminist and queer spaces of sociability and production, and the various support structures of art, including home, school, exhibition, labour, and friendship. Her books include The Artist As (Sternberg Press, 2018) and The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess (The MIT Press, 2019). McDowell currently leads the Australia Research Council project Care and Repair: Rethinking Contemporary Curation for Conditions of Crisis. Her presentation on Simone Leigh is drawn from her current book project, The Mother Artist, which was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a Henry Moore Foundation Research Grant (both in 2023).