Between African Sculpture and Black Diasporic Experiences: Hugh Hayden and Simone Leigh

| african arts AUTUMN 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 3 Historical works of African sculpture have become increasingly entangled with the global Black Lives Matter movement. A popular sign that was carried by protestors in the United Kingdom after the police killing of the unarmed African American man George Floyd in May 2020 read: “Don’t like looting? You will hate the British Museum.” Meanwhile, a statement from the British Museum deploring Floyd’s death and expressing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement sparked thousands of tweets accusing the institution of hypocrisy and insensitivity. In June 2020, Paris Black Lives Matter demonstrators tried to seize artifacts at the Musée du Quai Branly. The material lives of African sculptural objects are today intimately linked with Black diasporic experiences, and these connections are made explicit in the work of contemporary American artists Hugh Hayden (b. 1983) and Simone Leigh (b. 1967). Both Hayden and Leigh draw on African sculptural traditions, largely from West and Central Africa, and sometimes even incorporate the objects themselves in their own sculptures. Their work creates a parallel between the colonial pillaging and displacement of African sculpture to Europe and North America and the forced diaspora of slavery and its afterlives in the United States. In his practice, Hayden utilizes wood as his primary medium, playing with its multilayered histories—African sculpture offers one iteration of this material. His sculptures and installations reflect on the history of social politics in the United States and the contribution of enslaved Africans to American culture and cuisine. Alternatively, Leigh’s practice, which spans sculpture, performance, film, and activist-based work, is concerned with the marginalization of Black women and their exclusion from the archive or history. She uses her work to reframe the experiences of Black women as central to society. Hayden and Leigh bring these respective concerns to bear on the histories of African sculpture. The adoption of African sculpture by Hayden and Leigh occurs against a background of twentieth-century engagements with these traditions by European and African American artists and theorists. The Paris avant-garde’s “discovery” of African sculpture, known then as art nègre, or “Black art,” effected the constitution of AfroAmerican modernism. The African American philosopher and art critic Alain LeRoy Locke (1895–1954), an influential figure of the Harlem Renaissance who travelled frequently to Paris, encouraged African American artists to adopt African sculptural traditions as a way to “reconnect” with an ancestral Africa in the creation of a Black art. However, African sculpture signifies differently today than it did at this earlier moment in time. There has been a turn toward the material lives of these objects and the contexts of violence through which they were acquired by Western institutions. The global Black Lives Matter movement has renewed calls for restitution as a requirement for a postracist society. In this article, I argue that contemporary artists have picked up on current debates around African sculpture. Hayden and Leigh make use of these associations to convey experiences of the Middle Passage, slavery, and its afterlives in the United States, but also a past that cannot be reassembled due to these events. Rather than an atavistic return to origins, their work demonstrates the remapping of cultural production in the New World and, in the case of Leigh, these concerns are specifically addressed with regards to the labor of Black women.