02 works, PORTRAIT OF A LADY, Simone Leigh’s Las Meninas, with Footnotes. #70

Simone Leigh (born 1968) is an American artist from Chicago born to Jamaican parents who works in New York City. She works in various media including sculpture, video installation and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society. More on Simone Leigh

Simone Leigh’s Las Meninas seems to be a take off on Diego Velázquez’s painting of the same name from 1656, see below. Diego Velázquez was the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age. Las Meninas’s enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted. Because of these complexities, Las Meninas has been one of the most widely analyzed works in Western painting…

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