Simone Leigh: Brick House

For the inaugural High Line Plinth, Simone Leigh presents Brick House, a sixteen-foot-tall bronze bust of a black woman whose torso is conflated with the forms of a skirt and a clay house. Her head is crowned with an afro, framed by cornrow braids along her hairline that extend off her scalp into four braids, each ending with a cowrie shell. The domed shape of her shoulders and bust are adorned with a pattern of elongated ridges. 

Brick House, titled after the expression popularized by the 1977 Motown song by The Commodores, is the first monumental work in Anatomy of Architecture, Leigh’s continuing series of sculptures that combine architectural forms from regions as varied as West Africa and the American South with the human body. The sculpture references numerous architectural styles: Batammaliba architecture from Benin and Togo; the teleuk of the Mousgoum people of Cameroon and Chad; and the restaurant Mammy’s Cupboard from the southern U.S. All three references inform both the formal elements of the work—the conflated image of woman and architecture—and its conceptual framework.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.