Peder Lund Art Advisory Associates is honored to have facilitated the acquisition of Simone Leigh's "Last Garment" by an esteemed institutional collection — a placement that brings one of the defining sculptural works of the past decade into permanent institutional care. The work has traveled widely, accumulating at each stop a depth of critical and public engagement that reflects its importance not only within Leigh's practice but within contemporary art more broadly. That it now belongs permanently to an institution of the highest standing is an outcome of which we are very proud.
"Last Garment" is a large-scale bronze sculpture presenting a solitary figure — a young Black woman, bent at the waist, arms extended — in the act of washing a garment over a reflective pool of water. The pool is integral to the work: the figure leans over it, hands pressing cloth against its surface, and her reflection holds below her in the water with a stillness that the physical figure, caught in labor, does not have. The two — figure and reflection — form a closed world, absorbed entirely in the task.
The formal means by which the work achieves its power are characteristic of Leigh at her most commanding. The figure's limbs are smooth and precisely cast; her dress, by contrast, is deeply textured — crumpled, almost papery, as if it were itself a material under stress. Her hair is rendered in tight, densely coiled spirals. These contrasts between smooth and textured, between stillness and implied motion, between the ideal and the worked-over, give the sculpture a physical complexity that photographic reproduction diminishes considerably. It must be stood beside.
The title, "Last Garment," opens onto the work's fullest meaning. A last garment washed might be the final item of laundry — the end of a labor that will simply begin again tomorrow. But a last garment is also a burial garment, a shroud. The washing of the dead, the preparation of the body, is among the most ancient forms of care that one person can offer another, and it has historically fallen to women — specifically, in the context of Leigh's practice, to Black women, whose labor in this register, as in so many others, has been structurally invisible. "Last Garment" makes that labor visible, gives it monumental scale and permanent material form, and sets it before a pool of water that is simultaneously domestic and sacred, a washtub and a font.
Simone Leigh (born 1967, Chicago) is among the most significant artists working today. Her practice encompasses sculpture, installation, video, and performance, and across all of these forms she pursues a sustained, philosophically grounded investigation of Black womanhood — its histories, its aesthetics, its forms of knowledge, and the structures that have rendered it peripheral to dominant cultural narratives. Her work draws on an exceptionally wide range of sources: the sculptural traditions of sub-Saharan Africa, particularly the architectural and ceramic forms of West and Central Africa; the history of African American craft and domestic labor; the medical and institutional histories to which Black women's bodies have been subjected; and the rich, varied traditions of Black feminist thought and cultural production that run from the Harlem Renaissance to the present.
Her sculptural forms are instantly recognizable and deeply considered. Figures whose lower bodies dissolve into architectural or ceramic forms — jars, skirts, thatched roofs, raffia — assert a continuity between the human body and the built world, between the person and the tradition she carries. The scale of the work — often monumental, physically imposing — insists that what is being considered is not marginal but central, not peripheral but foundational.
Leigh has received sustained institutional recognition commensurate with the ambition and seriousness of her practice. She was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize in 2018, and her subsequent exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, brought her work to one of its most prominent platforms yet. In 2022, she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale — the first Black woman to do so — and her presentation, which encompassed both the United States Pavilion and a large-scale installation, "Sovereignty," in the Arsenale, was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. The prize was widely recognized as both an artistic judgment and a cultural statement of considerable weight.
"Last Garment" was first presented at the 2022 Venice Biennale as part of Leigh's US Pavilion installation, which she titled "Sovereignty." The pavilion's exterior was transformed by an architectural intervention drawing on the forms of vernacular West African architecture; inside, works including "Last Garment" were arranged in a sequence that moved the visitor through different registers of Leigh's practice, from the intimate to the monumental. The critical response was unanimous in its recognition of the presentation as one of the most fully realized national pavilion exhibitions in recent memory.
The work subsequently traveled as part of Leigh's touring retrospective, which brought the full scope of her practice before audiences at three further institutions: the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland. At each venue, "Last Garment" was among the works that attracted the most sustained critical attention — a sculpture that, whatever the institutional context, commands the room it occupies.
The placement of "Last Garment" with a permanent institutional collection represents, for Peder Lund Art Advisory Associates, one of the most significant transactions we have been privileged to facilitate. It reflects our commitment to bringing works of the first importance before the institutions best equipped to care for them and present them to the audiences they deserve — and our conviction, held from the outset of our engagement with Leigh's practice, that her work occupies a place at the very center of contemporary art's most urgent conversations.