COURTNEY M. LEONARD

ARTWORKS & INSTALLATIONS

BREACH: Logbook 21 | CONVOKE

BREACH: Logbook 21 | NEBULOUS | GHOST TRAP STUDY – MTS O1

BREACH: Logbook 21 | NEBULOUS | ARTIFICE – CSW2 & CSW3

BREACH: Logbook 21 | SCRIMSHAW STUDY #3

BREACH: Logbook 21 | NEBULOUS | FLOW TRAP STUDY G1

COURTNEY M. LEONARD


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.

Courtney Leonard, “BREACH: Logbook 21 | NEBULOUS | FLOW TRAP STUDY G1”, 2021, Coiled & Woven Earthenware, Appx. 15” x 15” x 5.5″

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

Courtney Leonard, "BREACH: Logbook 24 | TRANSCENDENCE", 2024, Installation at Friedman Benda, NYC, Courtesy of Friedman Benda and Courtney M. Leonard. Photography by Timothy Doyon.

Courtney Leonard, “BREACH: Logbook 24 | TRANSCENDENCE”, 2024, Installation at Friedman Benda, NYC, Courtesy of Friedman Benda and Courtney M. Leonard. Photography by Timothy Doyon.

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

CURRENT + RECENT EXHIBITIONS

Emily Cole: Ceramics, Flora, and Contemporary Responses Banner

Kelly Church (Match-E-Be-Nash-She- Wish Band of Pottawatomi/Ottawa, born 1967) Courtney M. Leonard (Shinnecock, born 1980), Convergence and Continuity, 2024 Acrylic, fired earthenware and stoneware, basswood, twine, black ash, red willow, sweetgrass, and birch bark. Installed within the exhibition Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland, The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. (January 25-July 12, 2025), Claire Rice Photography.

Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland

Group Exhibition | The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University | Evanston, IL

January 25 – July 12, 2025

Featuring Courtney M. Leonard 

VIEW THE EXHIBITION PAGE

Courtney M. Leonard, "Breach: Logbook 24 | Staccato", Installation at the University Museum of Art, UMASS, Amherst, MA, 2024, Photos courtesy of UMass Amherst University Museum of Contemporary Art

Courtney M. Leonard, “Breach: Logbook 24 | Staccato”, Installation at the University Museum of Art, UMASS, Amherst, MA, 2024, Photos courtesy of UMass Amherst University Museum of Contemporary Art

COURTNEY M. LEONARD | BREACH: LOGBOOK 24 | STACCATO

Solo Exhibition | University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMASS | Amherst, MA

February 14 – May 10, September 19 – December 9, 2024

BREACH: LOGBOOK 24 | STACCATO is the result of a multi-year artist residency initiated by the UMCA in collaboration with the UMass College of Natural Sciences and partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. The installation will fill the UMCA’s Main, East and West Galleries. It includes paintings, sculptures, and video exploring the life and kinship ties of Staccato, a North Atlantic Right Whale killed by a ship strike in 1999, whose remains are housed in the UMass Natural History Collections.

VIEW THE EXHIBITION PAGE

“Courtney M. Leonard: BREACH: LOGBOOK 24 | SCRIMSHAW”, exhibition at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, MA, June 1 through November 3, 2024

COURTNEY M. LEONARD | BREACH: LOGBOOK 24 | SCRIMSHAW

Solo Exhibition |  New Bedford Whaling Museum | New Bedford, MA

June 1 through November 3, 2024

Courtney M. Leonard has produce an entirely new body of work for the installation at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which continues her interest in coastal communities and historical whaling, while engaging the museum’s history, collections, and community partnerships with culture bearers from the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, also known as the People of the First Light.

VIEW THE EXHIBITION PAGE

PAST EXHIBITIONS

NEWS & FEATURES

FEATURED VIDEOS

Scrimshaw Takes Over the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Summer Exhibitions

The Wider World & Scrimshaw and Shinnecock artist Courtney M. Leonard’s BREACH: Logbook 24 | SCRIMSHAW explore sites of encounter and exchange across the Pacific and Arctic Oceans.

RECORDING | Online Artist Talk: Courtney M. Leonard & Judy Chartrand

Watch an online artist talk with Courtney M. Leonard and Judy Chartrand from the 2023 International Ceramic Art Fair, hosted by the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, Ontario.

ARTIST NEWS | COURTNEY M. LEONARD

COURTNEY M. LEONARD on view in New York & Massachusetts Courtney Leonard, "BREACH: Logbook 24 | TRANSCENDENCE", 2024, Installation at Friedman Benda, New York, NY, Courtesy of Friedman Benda and...

Courtney M. Leonard featured on NewsdayTV

VIDEO: Shinnecock artist Courtney Leonard showcases work at Heckscher Museum of Art Reported by Macy EgelandCredit: Newsday/Thomas A. Ferrara June 2023 Watch the Interview Here "Courtney Leonard is the local...

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