Shaun Leonardo, Resident Artist Lecture 2023

Shaun Leonardo gives a lecture at Skowhegan talking about his interdisciplinary practice which spans painting, drawing, video, installation, sculpture, performance, social practice, workshops, and collaboration. Some of the themes that Leonardo explores in his work are power, masculinity, spectacle, and failure. Leonardo tells the participants that when he came to Skowhegan himself, he learned how to be present, be a better listener, and find courage to be afraid in order to become a braver person and artist. Leonardo then speaks about some of his collaborative social practice, particularly reflecting on one project where he invited four groups, all who have a unique relationship to the incarceration and criminalization of Rikers Island, whether they were court involved youth, formerly incarcerated individuals, corrections officers, or legal practitioners both in prosecution and defense, to contend and struggle with each other. For Leonardo, social practice has also allowed him to become a better performance artist, because his performances have helped him manifest his struggle with his own self and allowed him to envision his form in order to shed discomfort and fully express his body. Drawing has also helped Leonardo configure questions he has explored in his image-making, particularly through his interest in boxing and fighting. Notions of invisibility and visibility is another theme Leonardo talks about in his practice. For Leonardo, the invisible man always struggles with himself due to his experience of being hyper visible through stereotypes that precede him in any room he enters, and how this hyper visibility can render him invisible, because people just want to see the version they wish too. Leonardo states how this reflection of invisibility and visibility is linked to an experience of blackness that follows him everywhere he goes. Leonardo eventually talks about how he has started to decenter himself and reach outward to call people into his practice, which has allowed him to move further and further into a semantic philosophy starting with the body. This decentering has allowed Leonardo to ask himself a series of questions: how do we locate truth, and how can we find and contend with the lack of humanity in the world? Leonardo then starts to conduct an interactive workshop with the participants, where he leads them to respond to a series of phrases and words through the movement, gesture and posture of their bodies. Leonardo ends his lecture by once again revisiting the idea of truth, by reflecting on how we can locate different types of truths in each other and within ourselves, as uncomfortable as that can be.