Zabar Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Zoe Leonard

Zoe Leonard (born 1961) is an artist working with photography, sculpture, and site-specific installation. Leonard reframes the act of looking itself as a complex and consequential process and questions how photography shapes our perceptions. Taking a conceptual approach and engaging with materiality and formal composition, Leonard works across a range of themes such as gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, migration, and displacement. Her work invites us to contemplate the ways photography can be used to construct both public and private narratives and histories. In recent years, her work has focused on photography’s roles in claiming territory and building nationalist narratives about land, possession, identity, and belonging. To quote the artist; “I am considering how photography can chart a new path of counter-narratives and liberatory gestures of un-building, re-thinking, and re-making how we see and engage with land, history, and each other.”

The Zabar Visiting Artist Fund has allowed Hunter to bring a series of artists to campus to work directly with MFA students in the art studio and to interact with students studying art and art history at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Through a series of public lectures the Zabar Visiting Artist also reaches Hunter’s broader student and faculty community as well as the public.