Walking into the Luhring Augustine gallery for the first time, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I didn’t know how I would react to the artwork or whether or not I would be able to fully comprehend the message that Simone Leigh wanted to convey. I knew she was an African-American woman who made pottery, but, what did that really entail? What did it mean to be an African-American woman in the 21st century?

As I stepped into the exhibit, the first thing I noticed was the pristine white walls that surrounded the artwork. The background is a very important factor in how a piece of art is perceived. It has to frame the art in a way that won’t distract the audience or take away from its intrinsic beauty. It has to showcase it, elevate it, and allow the piece of truly shine.

After wandering around the gallery for a while and looking at a few of the sculptures, I found myself drawn to a large, pear-shaped straw sculpture at the end of a short hallway that led into a second room. There was something so majestic about it, with the light enveloping the sculpture, giving it a halo effect. It represented a symbol of great power and femininity and I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off of it. The materials Simone Leigh used were not ones that people would typically consider precious or valuable, but, yet, she somehow managed to create something so undeniably breathtaking and that’s what makes her such a magnificent artist.

Simone Leigh incorporated the use of shapes and symbols to present a greater idea to her audience. The straw body gets increasingly smaller in size as you move towards the head of the sculpture, acting as a leading line to the focal point of the artwork. The head is representative of the African-American Face Jug, which, according to Simone Leigh herself, is a way to “fuse the black body with a tool”. The interesting thing about her twist on the traditional face jug is the ambiguity of the face, as there are no eyes on the sculpture. The two prominent features are the nose and the mouth, which are distinctively African traits. The statues that Simone Leigh had created showcase the beauty of the African-American woman in a way that it has never been shown before. If you think about sculptures, ancient Greek statues of male figures seem to come to mind. What Simone does is bring attention to a figure that is very under-represented in the art world — the black woman. Something that was always regarded as the minority, is now the dominant force in our world, thanks to her.