Hauser & Wirth, New York 

Acquired from the above by the present owner

“Though without eyes, they are not without affect. How many emotions can be read from the tilt of a chin, the slope of a nose, and the many varieties of coiffure styled from hundreds of miniature hand-rolled porcelain rosettes? Sometimes they have no face [...] maybe they have seen too much. Perhaps through their unseeing eyes we might comprehend the riddle of private and public and publics winding across Leigh's multiple arenas of engagement. Perhaps it is a riddle Leigh answers as easily as she sometimes offers an entry and elsewhere seals it up.”

—Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

Standing at the intersection of portrait and archetype, Simone Leigh’s Titi (Zircopax) redefines representation through withholding, weight, and form. Deliberately simplified, the ceramic bust restricts the specificity traditionally associated with portraiture, redirecting attention away from likeness and toward presence. Leigh frequently forgoes realistic faces in her sculptural practice — not as an act of erasure, but as a means of shifting emphasis from the individual to the collective. As she explained in a 2019 interview with The Art Newspaper, “As I work, I imagine a kind of experience, a state of being, rather than one person. I toggle back and forth between abstraction and figuration.”

Born in Chicago to Jamaican parents, Simone Leigh draws on a wide range of African and diasporic traditions. She works in a mode she has described as auto-ethnographic, engaging materials, forms, and sculptural languages rooted in West and South African traditions, alongside early African American vernacular forms. These sources provide both formal vocabulary and conceptual grounding for her work. Leigh has noted that African art and everyday “vernacular objects” function for her as “a means of exploring a multitude of themes, particularly the notion of women’s work, authorship, anonymity, and other ways in which we perceive culture and value.” Within her practice, such references are neither illustrative nor nostalgic, but are reactivated through form and material.

Leigh’s busts merge the language of traditional craft with contemporary sculpture, drawing on ceramic histories shaped by use, labor, and transmission. She has spoken of her interest in age-old pottery practices as sites of accumulated knowledge, where form and function are inseparable from cultural memory. Her practice looks toward the legacies of Ladi Kwali’s clay vessels as well as the face jugs of the American South — stoneware forms with stylized features originally produced by enslaved artisans. Leigh has described such vernacular works not simply as utilitarian objects but as “power objects,” invested with presence and agency. Through these references, her work aligns itself with a lineage of Black female creativity that moves between the domestic sphere and the space of sculpture, carrying its histories forward rather than leaving them behind.

Working in clay, a medium historically viewed as “women’s work” or craft, Leigh deliberately elevates materials and subjects that have been marginalized. Titi (Zircopax) stands as both homage and innovation: its form echoes a classical bust, yet the use of clay and the absence of a direct gaze (the figure has no carved eyes to meet the viewer) subvert the traditional power dynamic of portraiture. The figure’s upright stature and crown-like rosette-braided hair quietly convey strength and regality. Though anonymous, she represents Black womanhood in collective terms — more archetype than individual. Leigh has said she seeks to portray femininity “as something solid and enduring rather than always something fragile and weak,” as she told CBS News in 2019.

Leigh’s titles play a measured but intentional role in shaping how her works are encountered. Often drawing on scientific or coded language, they function less as explanations than as points of entry, opening additional registers of meaning without fixing interpretation. In Titi (Zircopax), the subtitle refers to zirconium silicate, a white powder commonly used in ceramics as an opacifier, valued for its ability to produce bright, opaque whites in glaze. The term introduces a material vocabulary while remaining deliberately oblique, aligning surface and substance without collapsing one into the other. Read alongside the sculpture’s restrained form, the title resonates with curator and art historian Helen Molesworth’s observation that Leigh’s ceramic figures act as “sentinels holding space for a culture that is very much in the making, a culture in which whiteness is neither the center nor the frame.” Rather than asserting meaning outright, Leigh’s use of technical language sustains a space in which material, history, and form remain in quiet but deliberate tension.

Despite its historical references and scholarly depth, Leigh’s art remains accessible on a human level. The tactile presence of clay and the intimate scale of the bust invite viewers to engage with it directly. Titi (Zircopax) exemplifies her effort to rewrite the art historical canon by centering Black female forms and craft traditions. It stands as a testament to the resilience and creativity of generations of Black women often left out of mainstream history. In Leigh’s hands, clay becomes a vessel of memory and empowerment. The result feels at once ancient and contemporary — a celebration of Black femininity.