Leilah Babirye’s first solo museum show, We Have a History, at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, is comprised of twelve large-scale sculptures made between 2019 and 2024, three of which are on view for the first time. Like much of the Uganda-born, Brooklyn-based artist’s work, each sculpture is an expressive human portrait composed from chain-sawed, burnished, coil-built, and glazed materials that Babirye further “adorns” with found materials to aesthetic and symbolic ends. In so doing, the artist’s work blends the inspiration of surrealist abstraction characteristic of modernist British sculpture with the mask-making techniques of West African artists, particularly women-identifying sculptors. By invitation of the museum and Natasha Becker, the de Young’s inaugural curator of African art, Babirye’s contemporary figures are installed within the museum’s historic African art collection. Babirye is only the second African artist in the museum’s nearly 130-year history to intervene in the collection. Her gender-fluid figures bring the surrounding objects to life as ancestral precedents, activating and innovating a lineage of craft in a way that both reflects the world’s real diversity and pushes against the museum’s colonial legacy.
Babirye’s use of clay grounds her practice in history while allowing her to evoke the somatic gestures that are so central to her vision. Two works at the exhibition’s entrance, standing on raised, green, stagelike plinths, exemplify this vision. Unlike surrounding objects from the museum’s collection, these large figures are free from glass enclosures and embellished with the discarded commodities of global industrialization. One of them, Nakimbugwe from the Kuchu Royal Family of Buganda (2024) is a slightly larger-than-life ceramic head with dripped glazes that range from ashen pastel grays to mid-toned ochres. These glazes accentuate the textured surface and the figure’s hollowed, angled eyes and eyelids. A perpendicular column of a nose sits squarely between the eyes, stopping above a puckered, open mouth. The artist’s physical engagement is palpable in each compositional detail: the large topknot of clay pinched into place on the figure’s head, for example, or the coin-size holes formed in the earlobes. Clay has this ability to make visible the residual impression of an artist’s hand, such that a thumb in clay or the edge of a chainsaw conveys a figure’s emotional and psychological depths. The figure is further styled with braided rubber tubes that are wrapped around the topknot and fall from the ears. This sculpture sits atop a black, burned-wood pedestal, embossed at strategic points with copper lines. The expression of the figure is dynamic. It could be shouting your name, calling for a taxi, or singing karaoke.
View of Leilah Babirye’s Nakimbugwe from the Kuchu Royal Family of Buganda, 2024, in Leilah Babirye: We Have a History, de Young, San Francisco, 2024. Photo by Gary Sexton. Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Nakimbugwe’s neighbor, Senga Muzanganda (Auntie Muzanganda) (2020) is an ochre-glazed bust with a tall neck, open mouth, knoblike chin and nose, closed eyes, and ears that jut out from the face like the handles of a mug. At first glance, the work could be mistaken for an object from the museum’s collection—if not for the figure’s earrings made of tin-can lids, which dangle like strung coins from each earlobe, and a towering headdress made from entwined blue-plastic wire, an orange extension cord, zip ties, rope, metal wire, more tin lids, and clear plastic tubing. The headdress approximates a colorful weave that falls casually over one eye like fringe. At the same time, it resembles a rigid basket made for protection, or a cage. Suggesting fashion and survival all at once, the headdress typifies the dichotomies that echo throughout the exhibition. Fashionable adornments imbue these figures with personality and make them stand out; they are also equipped with defensive objects, like a bike lock or pair of scissors, or binding materials such as a metal shower cord or zip ties.
Just as Babirye combines seemingly binary associations through her sculptural assemblage, she also plays with language to undermine prejudicial conventions. Her use of discarded materials has its origins in the Luganda term ebisiyaga, which means sugarcane husk and is also a pejorative used to describe gay people. “It’s rubbish,” Babirye said in an interview with Cultured, “the part of the sugarcane you throw out.” To subvert that association, her sculptures accentuate the inherent beauty of cast-off materials like wire or rubber tubes. Her titles similarly aim to subvert the exclusionary uses of language. Her figures bear invented clan names, a choice that responds to the reality that LGBTQ+ individuals, once outed, are often exiled from their familial clans—one of the many violent effects of the homophobia that Christian colonialism introduced to Uganda. The title Abambejja ba Kabaka (Sister of the King III) (2020)—an earless, wall-mounted mask made of burnished, black wood, with closed eyes, a closed mouth, and one “patch” nailed over the left eye—mimics the structure of a clan name. With this linguistic strategy, Babirye elevates the social status of her figures into an inclusive, imaginary constellation of royal-family relations.
Leilah Babirye, Senga Muzanganda (Auntie Muzanganda), 2020. Property of a Private Collection, Boston. Photo by Greg Carideo. Courtesy of the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery and Gordon Robichaux.
Babirye’s explicit naming stands in stark contrast to the anonymity of many sculptures in the de Young’s collection. The historical works are rarely, if ever, attributed to individual artists. Take, for example, the twentieth-century Ijo Artist Figure, made of wood, pigment, and glass: the two-bodied, seven-headed figure, holding a medicine bottle and spear for protection, serves to “safeguard warriors and villages from enemies and disease,” according to its accompanying label. Seen alongside Babirye’s sculptures, the figure’s multiple heads invite more open-ended questions: Who is the foe, and who is othered? Is the foe the Ugandan court upholding the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act, which punishes consensual same-sex relations with sentencing up to life imprisonment? Or is it the 1860 Indian Penal Code introduced by British colonial rule and used to criminalize homosexuality throughout it colonies?
Like many Western institutions in the Global North, the de Young is actively reckoning with its colonial legacy. The museum acquired much of its collection during the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition, an event modeled after the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair that featured, among other racist spectacles, a “West African village.” As the first Black curator in the museum’s history, Becker champions institutional change while reiterating her belief in the value of historical collections. As she puts it, “This is a time for accountability, for asking real questions, and for transformation in US museums.” In that spirit, she has spearheaded efforts for contemporary artists to engage and intervene with the collection, illustrating how it is not simply representative of a static history but rather a dynamic, unfolding canon.
Leilah Babirye, Abambejja ba Kabaka (Sister of the King III), 2020. Bill and Christy Gautreaux Collection, Kansas City, Mo. Photo by Daniel Terna. Courtesy of the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery and Gordon Robichaux.
Such work requires great care and intention. Western museums, biennials, and artists have a dubious track record of looking to and extracting Indigenous forms of artistic craft and production. Situating Babirye within this fraught maelstrom might offer a step forward. The artist simultaneously refuses and corrects assumptions about binary gender within the African collection, while confronting the colonial violence that not only criminalized same-sex relationships but facilitated the de Young’s acquisition of African cultural and sacred objects.
Works like the ash ochre wood figure from twentieth-century Cameroon—identified as a king by museum labels, “probably Njikki II (1910-1943) . . . one of the most prominent leaders of the Bahmileke kingdoms”—take a central position alongside Babirye’s figures. They are no longer remote sources of modernist inspiration but fellow members of a living cultural constellation. This show is especially significant now, given the defunding of cultural organizations of all sizes—including the de Young’s umbrella organization, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco—and recent and promised political enactment of discriminatory violence by a US regime that privileges a baroque fantasy of the beaux arts. Against this backdrop, it is vital to platform rigorous and empowering artistic interventions that celebrate the rich diversity of society.
