Zoe Leonard (born 1961) is an American artist who works primarily with photography and sculpture. She has exhibited widely since the late 1980s and her work has been included in a number of seminal exhibitions including
Documenta IX
DOCUMENTA IX was the ninth edition of documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition. It was held between 13 June and 20 September 1992 in Kassel, Germany. The artistic director was Jan Hoet in collaboration with Bart de Baere, Denys ...
and
Documenta XII, and the 1993, 1997 and 2014
Whitney biennials. She was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
in 2020.
Early life
Leonard was born in 1961 in
Liberty, New York
Liberty is a town in Sullivan County, New York, United States. The population was 9,885 at the 2010 census. The town contains a village also named Liberty. The village is bisected by New York State Route 52 (NY 52) and NY 55, and is ...
.
Leonard's mother was a Polish refugee who was born in
Warsaw
Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is officia ...
, immigrating to America at the age of 9 during World War II. Her mother's family were wealthy members of the Polish aristocracy who were involved in the movement for Polish independence and the Polish Resistance. Many members of Leonard's maternal line were killed during the war. Despite being non-Jews, her mother's family was persecuted by the Nazis for their opposition to Nazism and their
Polish nationalism
Polish nationalism is a form of nationalism which asserts that the Poles are a nation and promotes the cultural unity of Poles. Norman Davies, in the context of Polish nationalism, generally defined nationalism as "a doctrine ... to create a n ...
. Leonard has stated that her grandmother "was really invested in this idea that we were still aristocracy", although her family was living in poverty in Harlem. Aged 16, she dropped out of school and started taking photographs.
She has spent most of her adult life living in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
, whose built environment has been the subject matter of much of her work (e.g. sidewalks, storefronts, apartment buildings,
chain-link fencing
A chain-link fence (also referred to as wire netting, wire-mesh fence, chain-wire fence, cyclone fence, hurricane fence, or diamond-mesh fence) is a type of woven fence usually made from galvanized or linear low-density polyethylene-coated ste ...
, graffiti, and boarded-up windows.)
Leonard became well known internationally following her installation at
Documenta IX
DOCUMENTA IX was the ninth edition of documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition. It was held between 13 June and 20 September 1992 in Kassel, Germany. The artistic director was Jan Hoet in collaboration with Bart de Baere, Denys ...
in 1992.
Career
From her earliest aerial photographs to her images of museum displays, anatomical models, and fashion shows, much of Leonard's work reflects on the framing, classifying, and ordering of vision. She explained in an interview: "Rather than any one subject or genre (landscape, portrait, still life, etc), I was, and remain, interested in engaging a simultaneous questioning of both subject and vantage point, the relation between viewer and world — in short, subjectivity and how it informs our experience of the world."
Leonard was active in
AIDS
Human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a spectrum of conditions caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a retrovirus. Following initial infection an individual m ...
advocacy and queer politics in New York in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1992 she wrote "
I want a president
"I want a president" is a poem written by artist Zoe Leonard in 1992.
Background
Zoe Leonard is a New York City-based artist, feminist, and activist. Outside of "I want a president", Leonard works primarily in photography and sculptures, ofte ...
", a poem inspired by
Eileen Myles
Eileen Myles (born December 9, 1949) is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. No ...
's run for president.
In 1995 she staged an exhibition at her studio on the Lower East Side of Manhattan which featured the work ''Strange Fruit'', an installation of various fruit skins (oranges, bananas, grapefruits, lemons) that Leonard saved and then sewed together by hand with wire and thread. ''Strange Fruit'' is dedicated to the friend of Leonard and a fellow artist,
David Wojnarowicz
David Michael Wojnarowicz ( (September 14, 1954 – July 22, 1992) was an American painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter/recording artist, and AIDS activist prominent in the East Village art scene. He incorp ...
, who died in 1992. It grew out of a deeply personal response to the losses of the AIDS epidemic and as a meditation on mourning, it became a seminal work of the 1990s. ''Strange Fruit'' was exhibited in 1998 at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Fr ...
, where it currently resides.
During the mid-1990s Leonard spent two years living in a remote part of
Alaska
Alaska ( ; russian: Аляска, Alyaska; ale, Alax̂sxax̂; ; ems, Alas'kaaq; Yup'ik: ''Alaskaq''; tli, Anáaski) is a state located in the Western United States on the northwest extremity of North America. A semi-exclave of the U.S., ...
, an experience that influenced much of her later artwork, which often foregrounds relationships between humans and the natural world.
Trees are a
motif in Leonard's work: examples include a "reconstructed" tree that she installed in Vienna'
Secessionin 1997 as well as numerous photographs of urban trees mangled in chain-link and
razor wire
Barbed tape or razor wire is a mesh of metal strips with sharp edges whose purpose is to prevent passage by humans. The term "razor wire", through long usage, has generally been used to describe barbed tape products. Razor wire is much sharper th ...
fences.
Leonard began working on the ''Fae Richards Photo Archive'' in 1993 after being approached by director Cheryl Dunye to create a fictive archive of photographs for Dunye's 1996 fictional documentary ''The Watermelon Woman'', in which protagonist Cheryl, played by Dunye, searches for the history of black lesbian entertainer Fae Richards. The photographs, which Leonard treated by hand to appear aged, are used as props in the film and were included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial.
Between 1998 and 2009, Leonard worked on ''Analogue'', a monumental project consisting of an installation of 412 C-prints and gelatin silver prints
(in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Reina Sofia, Madrid), and a portfolio of 40
dye-transfer prints. Influenced by
Eugène Atget
Eugène Atget (; 12 February 1857 – 4 August 1927) was a French ''flâneur'' and a pioneer of documentary photography, noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to mod ...
and
Walker Evans
Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from ...
but born out of a 21st-century reconsideration of the role of photography, ''Analogue'' explores transformations in global labor, trade, and social relationships in parallel with the shift from analogue to digital image-making.
Holland Cotter
Holland Cotter is an art critic with ''The New York Times''. In 2009, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Life and work
Cotter was born in Connecticut and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned his A.B. from Harvard College in 1970, wh ...
described an experience of the work in ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' in 2009:
"In her straight-ahead photographs of storefronts, an arrangement of shoes or shrink-wrapped furniture becomes a vanitas still life. A hand-painted shop sign becomes a relic. Over several photographs, we sense that an unnamed neighborhood — Ms. Leonard expanded her field work to include
East Harlem
East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem or and historically known as Italian Harlem, is a neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, New York City, roughly encompassing the area north of the Upper East Side and bounded by 96th Street to the south, F ...
,
Bedford-Stuyvesant and
Crown Heights — is packing up to leave. A city's material culture is doing a vanishing act. And where is the material going? Back to a version of the world it came from. Many of the cut-rate goods sold in the Lower East Side shops originated in urban sweatshops in China and Pakistan and are eventually passed on as surplus to other poor cities in Africa and Central America. In the wraparound grid of pictures in Analogue we follow recycled clothes from Brooklyn to the city of Kampala in Uganda, where they are sold as new in stores like the Money Is Life House of Garments."
Exhibitions
''Analogue'' was first exhibited in 2007 at the
Wexner Center for the Arts
The Wexner Center for the Arts is the Ohio State University's "multidisciplinary, international laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art". The Wexner Center opened in November 1989, named in honor of the father of Limite ...
in Columbus, Ohio, and at Documenta XII in Kassel, Germany, followed by presentations at
Villa Arson
The Villa Arson, also referred to as the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts à la Villa Arson (National School of Fine Arts at the Villa Arson), is a French art museum, elite school and research institution for contemporary art, located in Nice ...
in Nice, and Dia at the Hispanic Society and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was included in a touring retrospective of Leonard's work which originated in 2007 at the
Fotomuseum Winterthur
Fotomuseum Winterthur is a museum of photography in Winterthur, Switzerland.
History
The museum was founded in 1993 and is dedicated to photography as art form and document, and as a representation of reality. Fotomuseum Winterthur is an art g ...
, and later traveled to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; MuMOK — Museum Moderner Kunst Stifting Ludwig, Vienna; and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. ''Analogue'' is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Reina Sofia, Madrid.
More recent exhibitions have included ''You See I Am Here After All'' at
Dia: Beacon (2009) which featured a set of 3883 postcards of waterfalls, reminiscent of
Yokoo Tadanori
is a Japanese graphic designer, illustrator, printmaker and painter. Yokoo’s signature style of psychedelia and pastiche engages a wide span of modern visual and cultural phenomena from Japan and around the world.
Career
Tadanori Yokoo, bo ...
's Waterfall Rapture collection of 13,000 waterfall postcards, one of which carries the phrase "You See I Am Here After All" which critic Jonathan Flatley connects to the work of On Kawara's telegrams which read "I AM STILL ALIVE" This work was also exhibited at the Whitney in Leonard's 2018 retrospective. Other exhibitions such as ''Serialities'' at
Hauser & Wirth
Hauser & Wirth is a Swiss contemporary and modern art gallery.
History
Hauser & Wirth was founded in 1992 in Zurich by Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth, and Ursula Hauser, who were joined in 2000 by co-president Marc Payot. In 2020, Ewan Venters was ap ...
Observation Point,
Camden Arts Centre
Camden Art Centre (formerly known as Hampstead Arts Centre until 1967 and Camden Arts Centre until 2020) is a contemporary art gallery in the London Borough of Camden, England that hosts temporary exhibitions and educational outreach projects. T ...
, London (2012), an installation at the
Chinati Foundation
The Chinati Foundation/La Fundación Chinati is a contemporary art museum located in Marfa, Texas, and based upon the ideas of its founder, artist Donald Judd.
Mission
The specific intention of Chinati is to preserve and present to the public perm ...
, Marfa, Texas (2013-2014) and the 2014
Whitney Biennial
The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, United States. The event began as an annual exhibition in ...
, for which Leonard won the Bucksbaum Award with her work "945 Madison Avenue". In 2018, the
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...
mounted Leonard's first career retrospective in the United States, an exhibition organized by the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's o ...
, where the show traveled in late 2018.
Other activities
Texts by Leonard, an insightful writer and a pre-eminent thinker on the discipline of photography, have appeared in ''LTTR'', ''October'', and ''
Texte zur Kunst
''Texte zur Kunst'' is a German contemporary art magazine.
History
''Texte zur Kunst'' was founded in 1990 in Cologne by art historian Stefan Germer and art critic Isabelle Graw. It has been published in Berlin since 2000. Since the death of ...
'', and in recent monographs on
Agnes Martin
Agnes Bernice Martin (March 22, 1912 – December 16, 2004), was an American abstract painter. Her work has been defined as an "essay in discretion on inward-ness and silence". Although she is often considered or referred to as a minimalist, Mart ...
, James Castle and
Josiah McElheny
Josiah McElheny (1966, Boston) is an artist and sculptor, primarily known for his work with glass blowing and assemblages of glass and mirrored glassed objects (see Glass art). He is a 2006 recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program. He liv ...
.
In addition to working on her art, Leonard has been serving on the advisory board of the Hauser & Wirth Institute since 2018.
Publications
* 1991 – ''Information: Zoe Leonard'' (with text by Jutta Koether), Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne ,
* 1995 – ''Strange Fruit'', Paula Cooper Gallery, NY ,
* 1997 – ''Zoe Leonard'', Kunsthalle Basel, Basel
* 1997 – ''Zoe Leonard'', (with an interview by
Anna Blume), Secession, Vienna
* 1998 – ''Zoe Leonard'', (with text by Elisabeth Lebovici),
Centre national de la photographie
The Centre national de la photographie is a French association managed by the Ministry of Culture, dedicated to photography and contemporary art.
In 2004 it merged with the "Patrimoine photographique" to create the association of the Galerie natio ...
, Paris
* 2007 – ''Analogue'', Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, MIT Press ,
* 2008 – ''Zoe Leonard: Photographs'' (with texts by Svetlana Alpers, Elisabeth Lebovici, Urs Stahel), Fotomuseum Winterthur, Steidl ,
* 2010 – ''You See I Am Here After All'' (with texts by Ann Reynolds, Angela Miller, Lytle Shaw, and Lynne Cooke)'','' Dia Art Foundation, New York; Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, UK ,
* 2014 – ''Available Light'', Ridinghouse / Dancing Foxes, London, UK and Brooklyn
* 2017 – ''I want a president: Transcript of a Rally'' (with contributions by
Sharon Hayes,
Wu Tsang
Wu Tsang (born 1982 in Worcester, Massachusetts) is a filmmaker, artist and performer based in New York and Berlin, whose work is concerned with hidden histories, marginalized narratives, and the act of performing itself. In 2018, Tsang received a ...
, Mel Elberg,
Eileen Myles
Eileen Myles (born December 9, 1949) is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. No ...
,
Pamela Sneed
use both this parameter and , birth_date to display the person's date of birth, date of death, and age at death) -->
, death_place =
, death_cause =
, body_discovered =
, resting_place =
, resting_place_coordinates = ...
,
Fred Moten
Fred Moten (born 1962) is an American cultural theorist, poet, and scholar whose work explores critical theory, black studies, and performance studies. Moten is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and Distinguished Professor ...
& Stefano Harney, Alexandro Segade,
Layli Long Soldier
Layli Long Soldier is an Oglala Lakota poet, writer, feminist, artist, and activist.
Early life and education
Long Soldier grew up in the four corners region of the Southwest, where she continues to live and work to advocate against the continu ...
, Malik Gaines, and
Justin Vivian Bond
Justin Vivian Bond (born May 9, 1963) is an American singer-songwriter and actor. Described as "the best cabaret artist of heir!-- MOS:GENDERID --> generation" and a "tornado of art and activism", they first achieved prominence under the pseudon ...
& Nath Ann Carrera), Dancing Foxes Press ,
* 2018 – ''Zoe Leonard: Survey'',
Museum of Contemporary Art Museum of Contemporary Art (often abbreviated to MCA, MoCA or MOCA) may refer to:
Africa
* Museum of Contemporary Art (Tangier), Morocco, officially le Galerie d'Art Contemporain Mohamed Drissi
Asia East Asia
* Museum of Contemporary Art Shangha ...
, Los Angeles ,
Recognition
Leonard was awarded the Bucksbaum Prize in 2014 from the Whitney Museum and the
Anonymous was a Woman Award
The Anonymous Was A Woman Award is a grant program for women artists who are over 40 years of age, in part to counter sexism in the art world. It began in 1996 in direct response to the National Endowment for the Arts' decision to stop funding in ...
in 2005. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Leonard, Zoe
1961 births
American people of Polish descent
American women sculptors
Artists from New York City
Photographers from New York (state)
Living people
Lesbian artists
LGBT people from New York (state)
People from Liberty, New York
Sculptors from New York (state)
20th-century American women photographers
20th-century American photographers
21st-century American women photographers
21st-century American photographers