The Spring 2026 Graduate Art guest lecture series, organized by Jack Bankowsky and Jason Smith.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts presents Simone Leigh

This event is free and open to the public. RSVPs are not required.

Simone Leigh (b. 1967, Chicago, Illinois) began exhibiting her work in the early-2000s. She has had one-person museum exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA, among others. In 2014 she presented The Free People’s Medical Clinic in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, a project commissioned by Creative Time. Her work was included in both the 2012 and 2019 Biennial exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Leigh is the first artist to be commissioned for the High Line Plinth; her monumental sculpture Brick House was unveiled in April 2019.

Leigh represented the United States at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 with her exhibition, Simone Leigh: Sovereignty, and her work was also included in the Biennale’s central exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Participant. In 2022, she presented Loophole of Retreat: Venice, a three-day symposium curated by Rashida Bumbray and featuring presentations by over 60 artists, writers, performers, and activists. In 2023, her 20-year career survey exhibition opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA and traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and California African American Museum in Los Angeles, CA. The Royal Academy in London is organizing a large-scale solo exhibition of the artist’s work opening in Fall 2027.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts has published widely on African-American history, politics and culture. Her book Harlem Is Nowhere, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2011, a National Book Critics Circle Finalist and cited by BOOKFORUM as the “Best New York Book” written in the twenty years since the reviews founding. Her book for young readers, Jake Makes a World: Jacob Lawrence a Young Artist in Harlem (commissioned by MoMA and illustrated by Christopher Myers), was named by Booklist among the year’s top books about art for children. She has contributed to exhibition catalogues on Simone Leigh, Richard Mayhew and Dawoud Bey among others. Currently serving as the inaugural curator-in-residence at Weeksville Historical Society, Rhodes-Pitts is an associate professor of writing at Pratt Institute and organizes collaborative public projects through The Freedwomen’s Bureau.

Image: Village Series (2023), Simone Leigh.

See the full Spring 2026 Seminar schedule here.

Support for this series is generously provided by the following: Jack Shear, Brenda R. Potter, Brendan Dugan, Lisson Gallery, Beth Rudin DeWoody, BLUM, Hannah Hoffman, David Kordansky, and Jeffrey Deitch.

ArtCenter's Graduate Art program is based on intensive studio practice and rigorous academic coursework. The program is distinguished by its low faculty-to-student ratio that provides students with the attention and feedback they need to refine and achieve their artistic goals. Faculty and students are artists working in all genres—film, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance and installation. A significant number of alumni have achieved national and international acclaim and often return to share their insights and expertise as visiting faculty and guest lecturers.