Public Art Final Paper - Brick House, Alex Hawkins

Photo by Timothy Schenck. 

Simone Leigh’s Brick House is a 16-foot tall bronze bust of a Black woman with a torso that combines the folds of a skirt that evokes a skirt-like house first unveiled in New York City on June 5th, 2019 until May 2019. Located on High Line at the Spur, at 30th St. and 10th Ave, this Black female figure aims to challenge its viewers to reflect on the architecture around us and how it reflects our values, customs, and traditions as a society. This powerful feminine presence was placed in a very masculine environment since everything around it is towering skyscrapers and cranes, concrete, and glass buildings. Leigh named this piece in honor of the Commodores song of the same title, a song she listened to as a child. “It was a celebration of black womanhood that we hadn’t really heard,” Leigh said in an interview for the New York Times. “That was what was resonant about it - not necessarily a male gaze but what beauty was associated with mightiness and strength, as opposed to fragility. Being solid.”

Made from 9000 pounds of clay and 6000 pounds of bronze, this piece was commissioned for the High Line Plinth, a new landmark for major public works in New York City, Brick House is the first sculpture in Leigh’s Anatomy of Architecture series that references many architectural styles, concepts, and processes all ranging from West Africa as well as the American South. Leigh took inspiration from the Batammaliba, the name given to the people of Northeast Tago, which translates as “those who are the real architects of the earth”. 

The Batammaliba believe in a connection between architecture, humans, and their environment. The designs of each building, whether it be a house, place of worship, or gathering space serve as visual reminders of the human body. Leigh was also heavily inspired by Mammy’s Cupboard, a 1940s restaurant in Natchez, Mississippi, that is shaped like a 28-foot tall woman wearing a round skirt that forms the exterior of the building itself. Mammy’s Cupboard originally took to looking like a darker-skinned Mammy figure, the racist stereotype of a domestic Black woman. Though it was repainted with a paler skin tone to downplay the racist stereotype, Mammy’s Cupboard remains a valuable symbol for the labor a Black woman provides. Leigh uses that metaphor and helps capture a beautiful understanding of Brick House. 

As a sculptor, Leigh works heavily in ceramics and always chooses to find new methods to work on a larger scale. The sculpture began as a ceramic maquette in Leigh’s Brooklyn studio. Using roughly two tons of modeling clay specifically chosen from a French quarry, the clay was mounted onto an armature and sculpted by a team with Leigh overseeing that the texture and shapes matched her vision. Leigh alongside High Line Art chose the Stratton Foundry for their experience with hand-sculpting and casting in large-scale sculptures. Usually, a smaller maquette will be reproduced as a full-scale foam model that the mold is made from. However, Leigh didn’t want to lose visible, personal touches important to her process that a computer-generated reproduction couldn’t obtain. For example, vertical ridges run along the sculpture’s base in reference to the ridges of teleuks- the dome-shaped dwellings of the Mousgoum, which are made from a mixture of soil, grass, and animal dung. The surfaces of Brick House were textured with sponges and steel wool to draw a resemblance to the texture of the teleuk. The texture was incredibly important to the story of Brick House, and she didn’t want to lose that feeling. 

Simon Leigh, maquette for Cupboard VII, 2016/2017. Photo by Timothy Schenck. 

The photo above shows an earlier maquette made for a 2017 exhibition. Leigh originally wanted to sculpt rosettes similar to the photo above for Brick House out of porcelain, however, hand-making rosettes at a scale that big proved to be a heavy challenge and incredibly time-consuming. Leigh and the Stratton team then rethought the aesthetics and timeline to better fit the architecture of the sculpture. The rosettes were changed into a textured Afro with asymmetrical cornrow braids around the scalp, taking inspiration from Thelma, the daughter of the 1970s television show Good Times. While Leigh described the show as extremely problematic, she also wanted to pay homage to one of the earliest representations of Black women. The braids end with cowrie shells, a homage to the Batammalibian. As in most of Leigh’s sculptures, the head’s eyes are erased from the figure completely. This stylized choice was made because Leigh wanted some African features to be more specific on the face, and the easiest way to make an abstract face without taking away key features is to remove just a few. The torso, in all its bullet-shaped design, is a symbol of a primitive dwelling that was used as a way to humiliate the Black community for years. By reclaiming the beauty and sophistication of those objects, Leigh found a new way to use a weapon meant to hurt and turn it into a symbol of resilience. 

Simione Leigh with a wax mold of a braid for Brick HOuse at Stratton Sculpture Studios. Photo by Constance Mensh. 

Once the clay model was completed, the team made a plaster mold crafted in 100 separate pieces of wax and plaster. Each of the wax casts was dipped into a ceramic slurry as many or more than 20 times for the six thousand pounds of bronze to be poured into. The bronze was melted into a crucible, a container that can withstand high temperatures for the metal to be processed. These bronze buildings were then sandblasted, fitted, and welded together to form the completed version of Brick House. 

Bronze Pouring into the molds at Stratton Sculpture Studios. Photo by Timothy Schenck.

The last step in the creation process was transporting the massive work from Philadelphia to New York where it will peer down at on-lookers where sculptural architecture meets historical architecture as a highly visible example of Black female representation. In New York City, there is a very small selection of monuments depicting important African-American figures in US history. Among them, there is only one African American woman- Harriet Tubman in Harlem. This reflects the general lack of representation of Black women, real or imaginary, in public cities all around. 

Not only does it represent Black women, but it also helps remind its viewers that you belong. One author, Nkgopoleng Moloi, was reminded of what it means to belong. She explains in her blog, “Simone Leigh Proved to Me That Black Women Can Claim Space in a Hostile World”. Moloi explains that as a child, she had to undergo the ritual of chemically straightening her hair, also referred to as ‘hair relaxing’. In Moloi’s own words, it was a ‘necessary evil’ in the path towards beauty. As it grew out, though, her hair would return to its original form, and the process would have to start all over again to relax her hair. Part insult and part advice, “your roots are showing” was a reminder that it was time to modify herself to live an easier life in a white hetero-patriarchal society. She explained that because memory takes root in gestures and objects, Brick House reminded her of memories as a young girl. The statue proudly allows its roots to show as a sign of powerful resistance. Brick House is architectural, not only in its form but also in the way it encourages feelings and memories of the Black body in a space. Moloi recognizes her history of suffocating displacement amongst her peers in office spaces was brought on by a long history of othering, reflecting, and embodying through this statue. 

The overall response to Brick House is a positive one. The majority of reviews showcase that this sculpture is not only a symbol of power for the Black community in New York but a monument representing everyday Blackness across the nation. Leigh’s artwork presses us to normalize something not only for its historical history of shame, but we can use that shame to design beauty through resistance. By creating a piece centered around the ongoing labor of Black women and femmes and the foundational importance of their work throughout politics, social, economic, religious, and cultural life, she tells a story to many younger audiences that shame shouldn’t be what breaks you down but should be what makes you resilient. 

Bibliography

Afinelyne, A. “Simone Leigh: Brick House ~ the Inaugural Installation on the High Line Plinth.” GothamToGo, April 19, 2021. https://gothamtogo.com/simone-leigh-brick-house-coming-to-the-high-line-plinth/#:~:text=Simone%20Leigh’s%20Brick%20House%2C%20known,High%20Line%20at%2030th%20Street.

“Brick House.” The High Line, May 26, 2021. https://www.thehighline.org/art/projects/simoneleigh/.

“The Making of Simone Leigh’s Brick House.” Hauser & Wirth. Accessed October 22, 2023. https://www.hauserwirth.com/ursula/28500-making-simone-leighs-brick-house/.

Moloi, Nkgopoleng. “Simone Leigh Proved to Me That Black Women Can Claim Space in a Hostile World.” ELEPHANT, September 10, 2021. https://elephant.art/simone-leighs-brick-house-proved-to-me-that-black-women-can-claim-space-in-a-hostile-world-24112020/.

Noemiperez. “The Making of Brick House.” The High Line, November 12, 2020. https://www.thehighline.org/blog/2019/01/14/the-making-of-brick-house/.

Pogrebin, Robin, and Hilarie. “An Artist Ascendant: Simone Leigh Moves into the Mainstream.” The New York Times, August 29, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/arts/design/simone-leigh-sculpture-high-line.html.

“Reflections on ‘Brick House.’” Reflections on “Brick House” | Weitzman. Accessed October 22, 2023. https://www.design.upenn.edu/news/post/reflections-brick-house.