UPCOMING
Emily Cole: Ceramics, Flora, and Contemporary Responses
Thomas Cole National Historic Site
218 Spring St, Catskill, NY
May 3 – November 2, 2025
Featuring Jacqueline Bishop & Courtney M. Leonard
ARTWORKS & INSTALLATIONS
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
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
Group Exhibition | Thomas Cole National Historic Site | Catskill, NY
May 3 – November 2, 2025
Featuring Jacqueline Bishop & Courtney M. Leonard
VIEW THE EXHIBITION PAGE

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
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
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
COURTNEY M. LEONARD in: Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland
The Block Museum of Art | Evanston, IL
January 25–July 13, 2025
Featuring Courtney M. Leonard
COURTNEY M. LEONARD in Shifting Shorelines: Art, Industry, and Ecology along the Hudson River
Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University | New York, NY
October 5, 2024 – January 12, 2025
Featuring Courtney M. Leonard
RIVERS FLOW/ARTISTS CONNECT
Hudson River Museum
February 2, 2014 – September 1, 2024
Featuring Paul Scott, Courtney M. Leonard, & Jason Walker
COURTNEY M. LEONARD | BREACH: LOGBOOK 24 | STACCATO
University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMASS | Amherst, MA
February 14 – May 10, September 19 – December 9, 2024
COURTNEY M. LEONARD | BREACH: LOGBOOK 24 | SCRIMSHAW
New Bedford Whaling Museum | New Bedford, MA
June 14, 2024 – November 3, 2024
THE NEW TRANSCENDENCE. at Friedman Benda
Friedman Benda | New York, NY
January 11, 2024- February 24, 2024
COURTNEY M. LEONARD
The Heckscher Museum of Art | Huntington, NY
June 10, 2023 – November 12, 2023
2023 INTERNATIONAL CERAMIC ART FAIR (ICAF)
By the Gardiner Museum
Toronto, Ontario
June 8 – 18, 2023
Ebb/Flow: Pritika Chowdhry, Chotsani Elaine Dean and Courtney M. Leonard
Leo and Doris Hodroff Gallery
Weisman Art Museum | Minneapolis, MN
December 17, 2022 – May 31, 2025
NEWS & FEATURES
FEATURED VIDEOS
Scrimshaw Takes Over the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Summer Exhibitions
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.
Shinnecock artist Courtney M. Leonard explores a connection made with a right whale held in the scientific collection at UMass Amherst | The Berkshire Eagle
ARTIST NEWS | COURTNEY M. LEONARD
Courtney M. Leonard featured in THE NEW TRANSCENDENCE. at Friedman Benda, New York, NY
Courtney M. Leonard in BOUNDLESS at the Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA
ARE WE THERE YET? Featured in the Berkshire Eagle
Courtney M. Leonard featured on NewsdayTV
Courtney M. Leonard featured in WSHU Public Radio
INQUIRE
Additional works may be available to acquire, but not listed here.
If interested in lists of all works and series: Send us a message