Simone Leigh and Sonia Boyce Win Venice Biennale’s Top Honor
American sculptor Simone Leigh and British artist Sonia Boyce right this moment have been named the recipients of the Golden Lion on the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale, with Leigh taking the award for Finest Participant, and Boyce accepting the excellence for Finest Nationwide Participation. Their wins are historic, marking the primary time a Black girl has acquired the prize for the reason that Biennale’s founding 127 years in the past. Moreover, every is the primary Black girl to symbolize her nation on the biannual occasion, whose iteration this yr, “The Milk of Desires,” was curated by Cecilia Alemani and is the primary to prominently characteristic ladies and trans artists.
Leigh, whose exhibition “Sovereignty” is occupying the US Pavilion, received for her imposing Brick Home, described by the prize jury as “rigorously researched, virtuosically realized, and powerfully persuasive.” The sixteen-foot-high bronze sculpture, initially commissioned for the Excessive Line in New York, makes use of the designs of Batammaliba structure and Mousgoum dwellings and references the 1940 constructing within the form of a smiling, wide-skirted Black girl that homes the Natchez, Mississippi, restaurant Mammy’s Cabinet.
Boyce received her Golden Lion for her exhibition on the British Pavilion, “Feeling Her Means,” incorporating sound, video, sculpture, and archival supplies to research the work of 5 Black British ladies musicians working throughout a broad vary of genres whose work has thus far been largely underrecognized. The prize jury characterised the present as “propos[ing] one other studying of histories by the sonic.”
Lebanese artist Ali Cherri received the Silver Lion, awarded every year to a “promising younger participant,” for his 2022 video set up Of Males and Gods and Mud, which locations Sudan’s Merowe Dam inside an art-historical context. The hassle was praised by the jury for “opening up from different narratives that depart from the logic of progress and cause.”
The Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement, awarded earlier this yr, went to Cecilia Vicuña and Katharina Fritsch, each of whom are exhibiting on this yr’s biennale.
