Leilah Babirye

Leilah Babirye was born in 1985 in Kampala, Uganda. She studied fine art, sculpture, and art history at Makerere University in Kampala, earning a BA over a course of study documented across sources as running from 2007 to 2011 (some accounts place her graduation in 2010). In 2015, after being publicly outed as gay by a Ugandan tabloid, she fled to New York, where she was granted political asylum in the spring of 2018 with support from the African Services Committee and the NYC Anti-Violence Project.

Her first solo exhibition followed later that year at Gordon Robichaux in New York. She began exhibiting internationally soon after, including a 2020 solo show at Gordon Robichaux and a 2021 solo exhibition, Ebika Bya ba Kuchu mu Buganda (Kuchu Clans of Buganda) II, at Stephen Friedman Gallery in London. Her sculptural busts, built from wood, ceramic, and salvaged materials and often crowned with found metal and rubber, are named for individual members of Uganda's Kuchu community and for figures drawn from Buganda royal history, merging personal testimony with an invented, celebratory genealogy.

Institutional recognition accelerated through the mid-2020s. Babirye presented Obumu (Unity) at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2024, the same year her work appeared in the main exhibition of the 60th Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. In 2024 she opened We Have a History at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and in 2025 she opened Ekimyula Ekijjankunene (The Gorgeous Grotesque) at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin. In 2026 the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston opened Embaga ya Naki ne Naki (Wedding of Naki and Naki), a solo exhibition of new ceramic and wood sculptures inspired by an imagined queer wedding celebration. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Critics have focused on how directly Babirye's materials carry her subject. Writers for Elephant, Cultured, and the Bay Area Reporter, including Folasade Ologundudu, Mia Gould, and Heather Cassell, have described her found-material busts as a transformation of discarded objects into portraiture that carries queer identity and community history. Coverage in ARTnews and Artsy has similarly treated her as a sculptor whose blowtorched, found-material busts turn an act of survival, fleeing persecution and finding asylum, into a public claim on visibility, tracing her from a 2018 debut at Gordon Robichaux to inclusion in the Venice Biennale within six years.

Babirye's market is young and still developing primarily through galleries rather than the auction room. She is represented by Galerie Max Hetzler, Stephen Friedman Gallery, and Gordon Robichaux in New York. At NADA Miami, a solo booth of her ceramic, wood, and found-object sculptures at Gordon Robichaux sold out, with works priced between USD 3,400 and USD 10,000. Her clearest confirmed auction result is Prince Ggamotoka from the Kuchu Royal Family of Buganda, which sold for USD 64,500 at Phillips New York on 17 May 2023. A separate work, Namasole Wannyana, Mother of King Kimera From the Kuchu Royal Family of Buganda, appeared in a Sotheby's Contemporary Day Auction in London in June 2026 with an estimate of GBP 20,000 to 30,000, but no confirmed final sale price for that lot has been located. Her strongest market signal to date is institutional recognition, including her solo exhibition at the de Young Museum and inclusion in the 2024 Venice Biennale, rather than a deep auction record.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Babirye, and her public auction history is limited to a single confirmed result, so it is too thin to establish a reliable price trend; the strongest evidence of demand right now is institutional rather than at auction. Access to her work runs mainly through Galerie Max Hetzler, Stephen Friedman Gallery, and Gordon Robichaux, and gallery presentations, such as a sold-out solo booth at NADA Miami, have moved quickly. Her rapid run of museum exhibitions, the de Young, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the Venice Biennale, and ICA Boston, is a meaningful signal of institutional durability, but with so few public sales on record, collectors should treat any individual transaction as an early data point rather than an established market pattern.