Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Simone Leigh‘s latest project entitled The Waiting Room opens tomorrow at the New Museum. Featuring a new installation, a series of “care sessions” and underground public programs, The Waiting Room aims to shift the preconceived ideas of medicine.
Leigh’s work, who is the artist-in-residence at The New Museum, specializes in a multitude of different art forms–from sculptures, videos to installations and performances–and emphasizes the unacknowledged roles of women of color in various societies. This project was developed from Leigh’s previous work Free People’s Medical Clinic, which offered free treatments and workshops in the Brooklyn home of Dr. Josephine English, the first black ob-gyn in the state of New York.
The exhibit focuses on an expanded notion of medicine, featuring muthi markets in Durban, South Africa, meditation rooms, herbalist apothecaries, movement studios, public and private workshops and healing treatments. Waiting Room highlights the difficulties that community-organized care programs have faced in the past, “from the United Order of Tents, a secret society of nurses active since the Underground Railroad, to volunteers in the Black Panther Party’s embattled clinics active from the 1960s to the 1980s.”
The Waiting Room is on view from June 22nd to September 18th. Hours for Public Programs and Care Sessions vary. Visit the website for more details.
