Simone Leigh is finally getting a Royal Academy show — but why has it taken this long?

In 2027, the Royal Academy will host a “monumental” exhibition by Simone Leigh — the first Black woman to represent the US at the Venice Biennale. Leigh’s sculptures and installations explore colonial architecture, exploitation, and the erasure of Black women’s labour. Mainstream critics are celebrating the announcement as progress.

But the real story isn’t just Leigh’s success. It’s the decades of neglect that meant her art — and the art of countless other Black women — was excluded from British institutions until now.

Who is Simone Leigh?

Simone Leigh is one of the most significant Black feminist artists of her generation. Her Venice Biennale pavilion drew global attention, with towering ceramic and bronze sculptures that re-centred the Black female body. She won the Biennale’s Golden Lion for Best Participant — a historic first.

Her work doesn’t sit politely in the art world. It challenges it. Leigh draws on African diasporic traditions and architecture to expose how Black women’s bodies have been used, fetishised, and exploited under slavery, colonialism, and capitalism.

She has described her practice as:

autonomy, self-determination, and resistance.

Why has Britain taken so long?

So why is the Royal Academy only now announcing a major Simone Leigh show for 2027? The delay is not an accident. It’s a symptom of how Britain’s cultural institutions have consistently sidelined Black women.

As the Guardian noted in its report, this will be the first time Leigh’s work is shown at this scale in the UK. That’s remarkable, given her global acclaim. Meanwhile, artists like Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, and Sonia Boyce spent decades overlooked before institutions finally celebrated them.

The art world loves to present these late recognitions as breakthroughs. But in truth, they expose a pattern: Black women are celebrated only when their work is too internationally acclaimed to ignore.

Resistance or tokenism?

Simone Leigh’s art is about power. Her sculptures reclaim the space denied to Black women for centuries. Yet now, the very institutions her work critiques are cashing in on it. The Royal Academy will frame the exhibition as diversity and progress. But unless institutions confront their own exclusionary histories, it risks being tokenism — showcasing resistance while refusing to embody it.

This is not a reflection on Leigh herself. She deserves every platform, every award, every headline. The problem is an art system that consistently ignores Black feminist voices until it becomes profitable to amplify them.

The wider context of Simone Leigh’s exhibition: Black feminist struggle

The timing also matters. Simone Leigh’s upcoming show arrives as Black women in Britain are fighting systemic injustice far beyond the art world. A parliamentary report this month found that Black mothers remain more than twice as likely to die during childbirth as white mothers. Black women are disproportionately targeted by policing and bear the brunt of racist far-right rhetoric in public space.

Against that backdrop, Leigh’s work feels urgent. Her art honours Black women’s resilience, but it also indicts the systems that exploit and erase them. If British institutions want to celebrate her, they should also listen to what she’s saying — and confront their complicity.

Simone Leigh’s Royal Academy exhibition will be powerful, monumental, and overdue. But we shouldn’t let the fanfare obscure the reality: Britain’s art institutions have spent decades ignoring Black women, and one headline show doesn’t undo that.

Leigh’s art teaches us that Black women have always carried the weight of labour, exploitation, and erasure. Until institutions reckon with that truth, they’ll keep showcasing resistance on their walls while failing to practice it in their halls.

Featured image via the Canary