Simone Leigh
When Simone Leigh represents the United States in the 2022 Venice Biennale with her own pavilion, she will become the first Black woman to do so. Leigh is famous for her medium-bending, groundbreaking works that often depict Black women (some well-known and others anonymous) and their hidden traditions and histories. Brick House, a 16-foot-tall bronze bust of a Black woman that is currently exhibited on New York’s High Line, is one of her highly celebrated recent works and is part of Leigh’s Anatomy of Architecture series, which fuses elements of the human body with architectural influences from Cameroon, Benin, Togo, and Chad as well as the American South.