| About the Show | About the Artist | Installation Views |
Courtney M. Leonard is a Shinnecock artist and filmmaker from Long Island, where culture and kinship revolves around whales and whaling. As a contributor to the Offshore Art Movement, Leonard’s practice investigates narratives of cultural viability as a reflection of environmental record.
She believes it is vital for artists to exchange with communities and honor such connections through inclusion and recognition, a foundation which has led her to travel and dialogue extensively with coastal Indigenous communities regarding their sustenance harvesting traditions and rights. Her multimedia installations challenge their audience to question and respond: Can a culture sustain itself when it no longer has access to the environment that fashioned its culture?
Leonard earned her Masters of Fine Arts in Ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design. She received a Best of Division in Sculpture from Eiteljorg Indian Market in 2011. 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.
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