Zoe Leonard
1961–
Zoe Leonard’s work has ranged from explorations of the natural landscape and the urban environment to issues of gender and the global circulation of goods. Whether in her early aerial photographs of cities, her observations of trees, a survey of New York storefronts, or recent images of the sun, Leonard has tended to amass multiple pictures into works as she investigates the relationship between the photograph and the natural or constructed world.
Such an archival impulse is reflected in The Fae Richards Photo Archive, a group of eighty-two photographs Leonard made in collaboration with the filmmaker Cheryl Dunye for the latter’s 1996 film Watermelon Woman. The film’s protagonist encounters the fictional character of Richards in an old film and is driven to research the African American lesbian actress’s life and career. For the Archive, Leonard hired actors to play Richards and her costars, lovers, family, and acquaintances in staged photographs that drew upon Dunye’s family photographs as well as existing images of black performers of the era. Leonard printed each image using historically appropriate processes, lending visual authenticity to the archive, and added detailed, typewritten captions for each. The narrative tracks the imaginary Richards’s life as a teenager and then as a Hollywood screen star, through the civil rights era, when her film career was obstructed by racism, and finally to her old age as a forgotten figure. Fae Richards had to be constructed because, as Leonard said, “certain histories are so vastly, wildly, crazily underrepresented” that even if she had lived “we probably wouldn’t have known about her.”
Introduction
Zoe Leonard (born 1961) is an American artist who works primarily with photography and sculpture. She has exhibited widely since the late 1980s and her work has been included in a number of seminal exhibitions including Documenta IX and Documenta XII, and the 1993, 1997 and 2014 Whitney biennials. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020.
Wikidata identifier
Q218207
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 11, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, installation artist, photographer, writer
ULAN identifier
500114723
Names
Zoe Leonard
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 11, 2025.
