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

Nature, Crisis, Consequence is a groundbreaking art exhibition that looks at the social and cultural impact of the environmental crisis on different communities across America. Showcasing works drawn from New-York Historical’s permanent collection, recent acquisitions, and loaned works, which collectively span the history of the United States, the exhibition explores subjects ranging from the proto-environmentalism of the Hudson River School to the razing of homes and churches to clear land for Central Park, the environmental and human tolls of the transcontinental railroad, and Indigenous artists’ calls to environmental action.

Exhibition highlights include the five-part series Course of Empire, Thomas Cole’s urgent warning against uncontrolled expansion into the natural world; an arresting seascape by Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee) overlaid by an abstract Pequot/Narragansett pattern which reclaims the present-day New England coast as Indigenous; and a woven ceramic basket by Courtney M. Leonard (Shinnecock) inspired by the mass fish die-offs on Long Island caused by climate change. Curated by Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto, senior curator of American Art at New-York Historical

Build on this Gesture

Flaten Art Museum St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN
February 6–April 7, 2023

Build on this Gesture features eight studio artists currently working and teaching within St. Olaf College’s Department of Art and Art History and Flaten Art Museum: Krista Anderson-Larson, D’Angelo Christian, Sophie W. Eisner, Courtney M. Leonard, Peter Bonde Becker Nelson, Anders Nienstaedt, John Saurer, and Michon Weeks. The work on view reflects the artists’ current research, expertise, and teaching interests, as well as emergent forms that embrace experimentation. The word “gesture” was used by many of the exhibiting artists to describe an aspect of, or motivation for, their work. Their meanings varied (expressive body movement, emphasis, symbolic offering, human connection) but always suggested something preliminary—something to build on.

An accompanying exhibition catalog highlights eight distinguished essayists working across Minnesota as curators, artists, writers, and creatives: Kehayr Brown-Ransaw, Zoe Cinel, Mike Curran, Heid E. Erdrich, Laura Wertheim Joseph, Matthew Villar Miranda, Melanie Pankau, and Andy Sturdevant. Each writer was paired with one exhibiting artist, and the pair became acquainted through studio visits and video chats. Their essays offer poignant, novel, and sometimes amusing interpretations of the new work on view. Seeding relationships of mutual creative exchange is a delightful outcome of this project—another gesture to build on.

On Courtney M. Leonard: Meeting Water
by Heid E. Erdrich in Build on this Gesture Exhibition Catalog

“How can water and light be made of earth and fire? I asked this of myself when I first saw Courtney M. Leonard’s ceramic depictions of whale teeth, fish traps, and her thumb-sized clay pendants embellished with historical images. I soon learned Leonard’s careful combination of the elements works to tell a story that only such a balance of all elements can tell.

Leonard’s art is bound to a life and culture that came into being surrounded by water, the Shinnecock homelands, in what is now known as Long Island, NY. In her work I sense a story that arises from water worlds and the threats to them all—threats both to the water worlds and to the Shinnecock people alike. Her shapes speak of water creatures and the work humans have done at sea or on a river—fishing, whaling, gathering shells for tools and art, and more—work we forget forged an extraordinarily successful economy for millennia. That work went on so long without threatening the water and its life because Indigenous people strive to understand their relationship to the creatures they depend upon. Leonard’s work continues the careful building of the relationship to water that has served Shinnecock people so long.

Several years ago, Leonard and I were at a convening with other fellowship awardees selected by the Native Arts and Culture Foundation. She gave a brief and insightful presentation on her art and shared the complex and deeply thoughtful process she engaged in before creating—a process of learning not only about place, butfromplace. In the years since, I visited Leonard’s installation,BREACH: LOGBOOK 20 | NEBULOUS“

— Heid E. Erdrich

BREACH: LOGBOOK 22 | BOUND

St. Gaudens Memorial, Cornish NH
May 28 – July 12, 2022

Courtney M. Leonard: Intermodal

Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College, Claremont, CA
January 22 – May 19, 2019