Zoe Leonard

Zoe Leonard
Born	1961 (age 55–56) Liberty, New York
Nationality	American
Known for	photography, sculpture

Zoe Leonard (born 1961) is an American artist who works primarily with photography and sculpture. She has exhibited extensively since the late 1980s in institutions around the world, and has been included in some of the most seminal exhibitions of recent decades, including Documenta IX and Documenta XII, as well as the 1993, 1997 and 2014 Whitney biennials.

Zoe Leonard was born in 1961 in Liberty, New York. At 16, she dropped out of school and started taking photographs. She has spent most of her adult life living in New York City, whose built environment has been the subject matter of much of her work (e.g. sidewalks, storefronts, apartment buildings, chain link fences, graffiti, and boarded up windows.) Leonard became well-known internationally following her installation at Documenta IX in 1992, for which she removed classical paintings of men from the walls of the Neue Galerie in Kassel and replaced them with small black and white photographs of women's genitals, which were hung alongside various portraits of women which remained on the museum’s walls.

From her earliest aerial photographs to her images of museum displays, anatomical models, and fashion shows, much of Leonard’s work reflects on the framing, classifying, and ordering of vision. She explains in a recent interview: “Rather than any one subject or genre (landscape, portrait, still life, etc), I was, and remain, interested in engaging a simultaneous questioning of both subject and vantage point, the relation between viewer and world — in short, subjectivity and how it informs our experience of the world.”

Leonard was active in AIDS advocacy and queer politics in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, as a member of ACT UP and as a founding member of the Feminist collectives fierce pussy and GANG. In 1992 she wrote "I want a president" a poem inspired by her friend, Eileen Myles's, run for president. In 1995 she staged an exhibition at her studio on the Lower East Side of Manhattan which featured the work Strange Fruit, an installation of various fruit skins (oranges, bananas, grapefruits, lemons) that Leonard saved and then sewed together by hand with wire and thread. Strange Fruit grew out of a deeply personal response to the losses of the AIDS epidemic (including the death of Leonard’s longtime friend David Wojnarowicz), and as a meditation on mourning, it became a seminal work of the 1990s. Strange Fruit was exhibited in 1998 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it currently resides.

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