Earlham Notable Alumni

Career

• Simone spent a semester interning at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, which helped cultivate her interest in art forms stemming from African Art and the African diaspora.
• In 2001, after a brief hiatus, Simone had her first show at the Rush Arts Gallery, known for fostering up-and-coming artists.
• Since the early 2000s, Simone Leigh has done countless exhibitions and has been featured in numerous catalogs.
• In 2023, she is starring in a one-person exhibition that begins at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and will then travel in the span of two years to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., ending with a joint presentation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and California African American Museum (CAAM) in Los Angeles.
• Her work will also be on display in two different selected group exhibitions, Ecstatic: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Crosscurrents: Intercultural Conversations in Art, MW Gallery, Flint, Michigan.

Awards and Honors

Some of the awards and honors Simone Leigh has achieved in the last decade include:

• In 2022, she received the Golden Lion for Best Participant at the 59th Venice Biennale.
• In 2018, she was granted the Hugo Boss Prize from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York and residency with the Goethe-Institut Salvador-Bahia in Salvador-Bahia, Brazil.
• Simone Leigh won the 2017 Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize from Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.
• In 2016, she was granted two fellowships, first the A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art in New York and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, also in New York. That same year she was awarded the Herb Alpert Award for Visual Arts in Santa Monica and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award in New York.
• In 2014, she participated as faculty of the Asiko Program at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Dakar, Senegal. 
• In 2013, she was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Awards in Painting, Sculpture, Printmaking, Photography, and Craft Media in New York.
• In 2012, she received the Creative Capital Grant in New York and was awarded the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Michael Richards Award for Visual Arts in New York as well. That same year she was the facilitator of the Asiko Program at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos, Nigeria.