COURTNEY M. LEONARD

COURTNEY M. LEONARD

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BIO

ABOUT

Shinnecock, b. 1980

lives and works in Northfield, MN

Courtney M. Leonard is an artist and filmmaker, who has contributed to the Offshore Art movement. Leonard’s current work embodies the multiple definitions of “breach”, an exploration and documentation of historical ties to water, whale and material sustainability. In collaboration with national and international museums, cultural institutions, and indigenous communities in North America, New Zealand, Nova Scotia, and the United States Embassies, Leonard’s practice investigates narratives of cultural viability as a reflection of environmental record.

Leonard’s work is in the permanent public collections of the United States Art In Embassies, the Crocker Art Museum, the Heard Museum, ASU’s Art Museum and Ceramic Research Center, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of the North, the Mystic Seaport Museum, and the Pomona Museum of Art.

Leonard has been the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships, and residencies that include The Andy Warhol Foundation, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, The Rasmuson Foundation, The United States Art In Embassies Program, and The Native Arts and Culture Foundation.

ON BREACH

“Breach” is an exploration of historical ties to water and whale, imposed law, and a current relationship of material sustainability. Navigation lies within visual translation; an account of relations and responsibility.
Charting exists as a log of record; the documentation and mapping of each point where the surface breaks.
As a visual acknowledgment, each work examines the evolution of language, image, and culture through video, audio, and tangible objects. Each component, a resonation of memory, documenting both social and environmental issues acknowledged through the cartography of mixed media.”

– Courtney M. Leonard, Shinnecock Nation

VIEW ESSAY & DOWNLOAD PDF

Read More & View the Exhibition Page HERE

ON BREACH | Essay for The New Transcendence By Glenn Adamson

“Why do we ever speak of a shore line? Where the water meets the sea, we find anything but a fixed boundary. All is flux, in all dimensions. As the tide rolls in and out, natural forms are perpetually revealed, concealed, and incrementally shaped. The forces involved are of astronomical scale, but this perpetual metamorphic flow is an intimate matter for those who live by, and make their living from, the sea. 

Among those with that deep understanding are the people of the Shinnecock Nation, whose unceded aboriginal lands are on the eastern end of Long Island. That heritage of insight, in turn, forms a firm foundation for artist Courtney M. Leonard. For the past decade, she has devoted herself largely to a series entitled, simply, Breach – a word that can imply underhanded betrayal (as in “breach of contract”) or on the contrary, a sudden emergence into visibility (as when a whale breaches). 

The ambiguity is telling, for fluidity can be seen throughout Leonard’s work, not only at the level of depiction – the wall-based work included in The New Transcendence can be read as the aerial map of a coastal zone, punctuated by fishing weirs – but also at the levels of making and meaning. It could also be an abstract painting, or a constellation. For as Leonard notes, “to understand the land and water, you also need to understand the sky.”    

Ceramics is, of course, a discipline born of the encounter between earth and water. Leonard has said that as she coils and interlaces the wet clay, bestowing intricate form upon it, the repetition of process prompts her to enter a meditative frame of mind, a self-transcendence akin perhaps to dreaming. When looking at the finished work, we are to some extent admitted into that same state of transport. To borrow from the late anthropologist and art critic Alfred Gell, Leonard’s cage-like structures function as traps, snaring us in a nexus of intention and reference.  

But if Leonard’s work is about various forms of capture – of time, space, and yes, of thought itself – she also approaches that dynamic with great care. She speaks of Indigenous techniques of aquaculture as being in a relationship of respect to nature; rather than locating weirs within migratory channels, for example, they are positioned off to one side, so as not to obstruct passage. Those fish that do get caught are, in a sense, offering themselves as sustenance; practically speaking, this method also prevents overfishing, ensuring the sustenance future generations. This ought to be the model for how we humans treat natural resources; it ought to be the model for design.“

– Glenn Adamson, 2024
Curator, writer, historian

Weather and the Whale

Group exhibition | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz | Santa Cruz, CA

May 29, 2025 – March 8, 2026

Featuring Courtney M. Leonard

VIEW THE EXHIBITION PAGE

Featuring Courtney M. Leonard

VIEW THE EXHIBITION PAGE

Emily Cole: Ceramics, Flora, and Contemporary Responses

Group Exhibition | Thomas Cole National Historic Site | Catskill, NY

May 3 – November 2, 2025

Featuring Jacqueline Bishop & Courtney M. Leonard 

VIEW THE EXHIBITION PAGE

BREACH: Logbook 25 | SUSTENANCE STUDY 1
2024-2025.
micaceous red earthenware

Acquired by the MEAD Art Museum. Purchase with William K. Allison (Class of 1920) Memorial Fund and Charles H. Morgan Fine Arts Fund, AC 2025.14

BREACH: Logbook 25 | SUSTENANCE STUDY 1
2024-2025.
Micaceous red earthenware

Acquired by the MEAD Art Museum. Purchase with William K. Allison (Class of 1920) Memorial Fund and Charles H. Morgan Fine Arts Fund, AC 2025.14

BREACH: Logbook 23 | SUSTENANCE STUDY #1
2023
ceramic (carbon reduction fired glazed stoneware)
13.5”x10”x1.5”

Acquired from Ferrin Contemporary to the Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA, 2024