Born in 1967 to Jamaican missionaries, Simone Leigh frequently rebelled against the austere belief system that she was brought up with on Chicago’s South Side. Escaping to Earlham College, a Quaker school in Indiana, she plunged into feminist theory and began expressing her ideas through clay. Leigh’s female forms—often combined with elements of African art, architecture, and ritual—lend cultural centrality to women and femmes across the African diaspora, and alive in her art are discourses both postcolonial and sociopolitical. Leigh’s largest sculptures can read like wordless manifestos. Indeed, at LACMA her breathtakingly scaled pieces not only evoke the magnitude of Black female identity, but also the space Leigh herself occupies in the contemporary art world. The exhibition includes works of installation, ceramics, video, and bronze. —Nyla Gilstrap