PLATFORM CSU ConSortiUm Event
Artist Shaun Leonardo
Date: February 11, 2021Time: 5:30pm to 6:45pm
Location: Live via Zoom
Primitive Games - performance, 1 hr. at Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, 6/21/18. Photo by Paula Court.
About the CSU ConSortiUm
The newly formed ConSortiUm, a collaborative project of art museums and galleries from the California State University (CSU) system, is pleased to announce a virtual event series that actively engages students, faculty, staff, and communities through visual arts-based dialogue. The inaugural program, PLATFORM, was launched in September 2020 and includes six live virtual conversations with contemporary artists, collectives, and curators whose work is critical to current re-imaginings of the art world and the world at large.
All events will be presented live via Zoom with access for all CSU campuses. These events are free and also open to the public.
Event Info
The first event for Spring 2021 will take place Thursday, February 11 at 5:30 p.m. featuring a presentation by artist Shaun Leonardo.
Event Registration Closed.
Close-captioned Event Recording Coming Soon.
From Seeing to Witnessing
In his talk titled, From Seeing to Witnessing, Leonardo will discuss his multi-disciplinary work, which interrogates societal expectations of masculinity, namely definitions surrounding black and brown masculinities. Speaking to his most recent body of work in The Breath of Empty Space, he will describe the physical and psychosocial negative space that is activated when viewers fill in the blanks, reframe details, and remix narratives based on both personal experience and perceptions ingrained by media and cultural biases. The artist will also describe his investment in performance as a process of embodiment—exploring the ways in which memory and trauma are lodged within our bodies.
About the Speaker
Shaun Leonardo
Shaun Leonardo’s multidisciplinary work negotiates societal expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding black and brown masculinities, along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. His performance practice, anchored by his work in Assembly—a diversion program for court-involved youth at the Brooklyn-based, non-profit Recess—is participatory and invested in a process of embodiment.
Leonardo is a Brooklyn-based artist from Queens, New York City. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, is a recipient of support from Creative Capital, Guggenheim Social Practice, Art for Justice and A Blade of Grass, and was recently profiled in the New York Times. His work has been featured at The Guggenheim Museum, the High Line, and New Museum, with a solo exhibition, The Breath of Empty Space, currently at MASS MoCA, then traveling to The Bronx Museum in 2021.
About the Performances
Primitive Games
Testimony #1
Press Contact: Kelly Lindner
Galleries & Collections Curator
University Galleries, Sacramento State
kelly.lindner@csus.edu
CPP Campus Contact: Michele Cairella Fillmore
Galleries & Collections Curator
University Art Galleries & Collections, Cal Poly Pomona
michelec@cpp.edu
