Using pre-modern and contemporary sculptural techniques, including lost-wax casting and salt glazing, combined with culturally significant materials such as cowrie shells, green bananas, raffia, and tobacco leaves, Simone Leigh has developed over two decades a poetic body of sculptures, installations, videos, and relational artworks that center race, beauty, community, and healing, referencing Black women's bodies and intellectual engagement. Originally installed on New York's High Line in 2019, Brick House —a monumental bronze bust of a Black woman whose skirt resembles a clay house—towered deity-like over Manhattan's bustling Tenth Avenue. Created as part of the Anatomy of Architecture series (2016–present), Brick House belongs to a group of sculptures that merge bodies and architectural references: from the howitzer houses of the Mousgoum people in Chad and Cameroon, to the clay and wood buildings of the Batammaliba in Togo, from Nigerian ibeji figurines , to the 19th-century African-American craft tradition of anthropomorphic jugs, to Mammy's Cupboard, a restaurant in Natchez, Mississippi, built in the guise of the racist mammy archetype , whose oversized red skirt houses the dining room. Evoking the ideas of container, comfortable space, consumer object, sanctuary, Brick House provides a powerful portrait of the black female body as a site of multiplicity.