June 21–September 17, 2016

1) “The Apothecary” (detail with clonette/ibeji) 2) Afrocentering with Aimee Meredith Cox 3) preparation for meditation 4) Maria Magdalena Compos Pons: Remedios, performance in New Museum Theater


 Simone Leigh: The Waiting Room inaugurated the annual Art and Social Justice Exhibition and Residency at the New Museum

For The Waiting Room, Leigh considered disobedience, desire, and self-determination as forms of resistance. While deferring and debasing bids for patience, pragmatism, and austerity underscore public debates on equitable care, Leigh found inspiration in parallel histories of urgency, agency, and intervention within Black social movements and communities.  Leigh implicates institutionalized violence and indifference as conditions under which self-care and community care become radical.

Focusing on an expanded notion of medicine, The Waiting Room referenced environments from herbalist apothecaries and muthi [medicine] markets in Durban, South Africa, to meditation rooms and movement studios. It involved public and private workshops and healing treatments that Leigh called “care sessions.” Blurring distinctions between bodily and spiritual health—and countering perceptions of holistic care as a luxury—she convened practitioners who viewed social justice as integral to their work.

 The project also drew from histories of community-organized care, from the United Order of Tents, a secret society of nurses active since the Underground Railroad, to the Black Panther Party’s community clinics of the 1960s–80s. The Waiting Room suggested that creating space for wellness could itself be an act of sanctuary and disobedience against systemic disregard for Black pain.

The project grew out of Leigh’s Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014), organized by Rashida Bumbray for Creative Time, which offered free treatments and workshops in the former Brooklyn home of Dr. Josephine English, the first Black ob-gyn in New York State. At the New Museum, Leigh expanded her collaborations with holistic health practitioners while creating an installation, intimate workshops for community partners, and public programs on aging, disobedience, healing ritual, and toxicity.
Publication
Simone Leigh: The Waiting Room exhibition publication, designed by Nontsikelelo Mutiti

Related Programs
 Chitra Ganesh: On Disobedience
Maria Magdalena Campos Pons: On Ritual as Medicine
Karen Rose: Healing Yourself with Plants
Vanessa Agard Jones: On Toxicity
  Lorraine O’Grady: Ask Me Anything About Aging  

Selected Press and Media
Simone Leigh: The Privacy to Heal, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, Art in America, September 16, 2021
Art is Medicine: On the Work of Simone Leigh, Helen Molesworth, Artforum, March 2018
Simone Leigh: The Waiting Room, Jessica Karuhanga, Cmag, December 1, 2016
Simone Leigh's The Waiting Room, Terence Trouillot, Bomb Magazine, July 25, 2016
Reflections from Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter,  Jillian Steinhauer, Hyperallergic, September 15, 2016
Black Health Matters Jenna Wortham, New York Times, August 27, 2016


1) Waiting Room Apothecary 2) Lorraine O’Grady: Ask Me Anything About Aging, performance lecture premiere.