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The Royal Academy will in 2027 host the first major UK exhibition by Simone Leigh, four years after she became the first African American woman to represent the US at the Venice Biennale.
Leigh told the Guardian she would bring a series of new “monumental work” to London in September 2027, focusing on themes including architecture, art made under fascism and her own connection – via her Jamaican heritage – to the UK.
“I’ve been thinking about American history a lot in the development of these works because we’re now living under full-on fascism here,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about the kind of art that’s made under fascism.”
Leigh said she had been shocked by the complicity of some US institutions as the Trump administration conducted its ‘anti-woke’ attacks, saying the situation was reminiscent of the McCarthy era.
She said: “I don’t know if you noticed what happened really early on with Columbia [University]. They were almost doing a ‘prophylactic fascism’. They weren’t even waiting to be told to expel students and put down all protests … I guess you would have to go back to a McCarthy era to see this kind of obedience.”
“All institutions are under attack,” she added. “I know of artists who have signed contracts to do commissions and these commissions have been either stalled or cancelled for anti-DEI reasons. So it’s really happening … I’m more than concerned, it’s getting a little scary.”
The Royal Academy show will be the largest to date for Leigh, who is 57 but was in her 40s before the wider art world began to take note of her work, which was often in the form of ceramics that critics dismissed as a “material for hobbyists or studio potters”.
She has had a meteoric rise over the past 15 years, becoming an artist whose work connected Black Lives Matter to older movements, while also chiming with the theory of African American public intellectuals such as Christina Sharpe.
Leigh grew up in Chicago, attending an evangelical church where her father was the preacher, before going to college and eventually living in a yurt near Charlottesville, Virginia, with a group of would-be ceramicists.
She said: “Because the show’s in London, it’s been making me hyper-focus what it means, my personal history, and what ties I have to London, which is really only through my parents, who were [born in Jamaica as] British subjects.”
She often works with clay, sometimes casting models into other materials such as bronze. Her sculpture Brick House, made in 2019, sat on the High Line in New York, and was part of The Milk of Dreams, the title of her Golden Lion-winning Venice Biennale show.
The show’s curator, Tarini Malik, said: “In terms of representing the breadth of her career, there are only a few spaces that can hold her work in that way.”
Leigh’s breakthrough moment came in 2012 with the You Don’t Know Where Her Mouth Has Been exhibition at The Kitchen in New York, which included Queen Bee (2008-2012), a “menacing chandelier conglomeration of black terracotta forms bristling with defunct TV antennas”.
At Venice, Leigh hosted the second instalment of her Loophole of Retreat event, where speakers, including Lorraine O’Grady, discussed everything from black feminist ideas to post-colonial theory, alongside performances. The first edition was held at the Guggenheim in New York, with queues forming at 8am.
The third Loophole of Retreat will take place in London, with a UK curator who is yet to be named working alongside longtime collaborator Rashida Bumbray.
The Turner Contemporary in Margate will show two of her sculptures – Bisi (2023) and Untitled (2023–24) – opening on 3 October and displaying until 15 March 2026.
