Simone Leigh dazzled in Venice. Her sculptures begin a national tour of the U.S. in Boston

BOSTON — A great, heaving simplicity, as of kneading dough, radiates from the works of Simone Leigh, who last year represented the United States at the 59th Venice Biennale — the first Black woman ever to do so. Twelve months on, the works from that Venice exhibition, with a few additions, have been beautifully installed at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. (The ICA, under the leadership of director Jill Medvedow and curator Eva Respini, also organized the Venice presentation.) The show will travel to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in November and to Los Angeles next year.

Leigh's sculptures, in ceramic and bronze, tend to be symmetrical and smooth. They combine the figures and heads of Black women with the forms of jugs, bowls, spoons and cowrie shells, as well as the repeated rhyming forms of hooped skirts, upturned bells and braided hair cascading from heads.

Against the run of so much modern sculpture, with its jagged edges and material mash-ups, Leigh's works are coherent and calm and lovely to look at. Occasionally I find them too placid, the forms themselves predictable to the point of complacency. But in their presence, one's breathing imperceptibly slows and deepens. Enlivened by subtleties of texture and color, they are surpassingly sensuous.

Leigh's glazes are especially ravishing. Their colors range from deep, saturated yellow and royal blue to earthy browns and greens, matte black, glossy white and gleaming gold. Their surfaces can suggest a rich, opaque ganache one minute, a light, translucent lemon-sugar glaze the next.

With titles like "Sentinel" and "Sphinx," Leigh's larger sculptures loom over you with the foursquare confidence of monuments. What do they commemorate? What or whom do they honor?

The answer is not complicated. They monumentalize and make known the invisible, unwritten and historically underappreciated labor of Black women. Not just physical labor but intellectual, too. They do this not with the committee-approved, kitsch-prone piety of public sculpture commissions, but with varieties of poetic self-awareness that induce deep reflection.

Leigh's sculptures are themselves the result of long and focused labor. (She is helped by assistants in the studio, foundry and kiln.) Many are made not with potter's wheels but a more ancient technique: coiling ropes of clay into a circle, laying one coil on top of another, then using handheld tools to smooth out the corrugations.

The tiny rosettes Leigh sometimes uses for hair are hand-folded and -pinched by the thousands. Contemplating their creation, I thought of two passages in Toni Morrison's "Beloved." In the first, the novelist describes "the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at her work: a ‘sth’ when she misses the needle's eye; a soft moan when she sees another chip in her one good platter; the low, friendly argument with which she greets the hens. Nothing fierce or startling. Just that eternal, private conversation that takes place between women and their tasks." Elsewhere, Morrison writes of early morning bread-making: "Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start that day's serious work of beating back the past."

But Leigh's salutes to Black female labor are different from Morrison's. They have a more public-facing, even majestic aspect. Instead of "beating back the past" — an instinctive response to trauma — Leigh takes imagery stained with racism and colonialism and inverts its implications, transmuting baseness and shame into beauty and power.

Unexpectedly, the forms of her sculptures can derive from hackneyed racist or colonialist tropes. "Last Garment," for instance, a life-size bronze sculpture of a woman standing in a reflective pool and bending over her work, is based on a late-19th-century souvenir photograph showing a Jamaican woman bending to wash clothes in a river. The image was widely circulated in Europe and used to lure tourists to Jamaica so that a sugar colony once built on slavery might be viewed as a tropical paradise populated with women living close to nature.

Similarly, several of Leigh's huge, wide-skirted figures are in knowing dialogue with an Edward Weston photograph of a roadside stop in Mississippi converted into a giant "Mammy."

At the Venice Biennale, Leigh erected a raffia facade on the neoclassical U.S. Pavilion, a building with strong overtones of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. She was inspired to do so by images of huts with thatched roofs presented in Paris at the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition. (The ghosts of colonialism and nationalism are impossible to ignore at the Biennale, which dates back to the 1890s.)

Leigh's giant sculpture, "Satellite," installed outside the ICA (just as it had been installed in front of the U.S. Pavilion in Venice), echoes the form of a traditional D’mba headdress of the Baga people of Africa's Guinea coast. Such headdresses were traditionally used during rituals to communicate with Baga ancestors. But examples of these and hundreds of other African objects were also sent back to Paris by colonizers at the turn of the 20th century, where they inspired such modern artists as Matisse, Picasso and Giacometti.

Leigh is aware of all these histories — American, European and African. Instead of undoing them, she co-opts them, presenting them in new, formidably self-possessed forms that invite us to register and perhaps reimagine truths about Black women omitted by the historical archive.

In all this, Leigh has been deeply influenced by her friend, the Columbia University academic Saidiya Hartman. Hartman is known for advocating what she calls "critical fabulation," her term for a strategy that responds to the silences and blank spaces in historical archives by inviting artists, historians and critics to fill in the gaps, imagining not only what was but what might have been. Her recent book, "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments," charts what she calls "a transformation of black intimate life" in New York and Philadelphia at the beginning of the 20th century. That transformation, she notes, was "the consequence of economic exclusion … racial enclosure and social dispossession." But it was also "fueled by the vision of a future world and what might be."

Leigh is similarly interested in jimmying open the past to project forward into more hopeful futures. But it is to her credit that, when you spend time with her work, it's hard to keep in mind highflying concepts like "critical fabulation."

Instead, her suavely pared-back poetry is animated more by silences and smoothed-out hollows than by rhetoric or fiction, and it draws you into a kind of sensitized trance. Leigh has created her world, as Hartman herself has written, "not by explaining anything, but … by a radical withholding that makes visible and palpable all that is held in reserve — all that power, love, brilliance, labor, and care. All that beauty."

That so many of Leigh's forms are vessels is surely not accidental. Vessels are hollow. You can leave them empty or you can fill them with things. You may well want to fill them with meaning — but you must make them first. And the making becomes its own kind of meaning, emerging from materials, tools, labor and aesthetic decisions, both intended and accidental.

I feel certain that it's this second kind of meaning that matters most to Leigh. After all, if it didn't, why would she bother? Work and beauty both disarm rhetoric. Leigh's sculptures, for all their eloquent ironies and historical hurt, possess a simple, well-crafted loveliness that reaches deep inside you, enjoining assent.

Simone Leigh Through Sept. 4 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. icaboston.org.