![]() ![]() “These media images are always accompanied by noise from surveillance footage, cellphone footage, dashcam footage,” he adds. ![]() “I needed a place to sit with Trayvon’s image outside the media noise.” “It is a space to grapple with those images in personal terms, as a person who feels threatened, as a person who feels afraid for my children,” says Leonardo, the father of a 13-year-old stepdaughter and 4-year-old daughter. Shaun Leonardo, Trayvon (2014-2017) Courtesy of the artist The artist says he began working on the drawings in The Breath of Empty Space in 2014, starting with a depiction of part of the face of Trayvon Martin, a Black 17-year-old who was shot to death in 2012 by a civilian “neighbourhood watch” patroller in a gated community. All of the art predated Floyd’s death, “but to see that people found solace and sought to look for meaning and intentionality in that work was touching,” he says. ![]() Leonardo says he was moved to see that the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police in May prompted people who had viewed the show in Baltimore to start posting his works online. Instead, he says, he has been heartened by the debate that the show’s cancellation triggered about invoking trauma in works of art and about “who owns” initiatives like the cancelled exhibition. Leonardo says he does not particularly view the show’s rescheduling as vindication. “They were willing to invite the tension in, and create space for the critical dialogue around the work”, the artist explains. Responding to the cancellation, he says, curators at Mass MoCA and the Bronx museum who had already worked with Leonardo on other initiatives reached out to him. ![]() He pointed out then that he “was never given the opportunity to be included in outreach, and therefore, never had a moment to engage any community member regarding the show”. In his statement, which was widely disseminated, Leonardo challenged the Cleveland museum’s rationale that the exhibition could be harmful because the local community was not equipped to deal with his images of “lived experiences of pain and trauma”. In an interview, Leonardo said that Mass MoCA and the Bronx museum reached out to him about presenting the show at the height of the controversy in June, when he lamented the show’s derailed opening in a brief note to colleagues and supporters. It originated at the Maryland Institute College of Art (Mica) in Baltimore in January before the Cleveland museum added it to its exhibition schedule and then dropped it. The drawings in the show, culled by the independent curator John Chaich, explore the visual narrative of violence against Black men in the US, often at the hands of police, revealing how the cycle of news media images shape and blur perceptions and memories of those events. The museum’s executive director, Jill Snyder, publicly apologised to Leonardo, acknowledging that “we failed” the artist, and the controversy ultimately led her to resign after 23 years at the helm. The cancellation of the Cleveland exhibition, which originally was to open on June, was denounced as “institutional white fragility” and “censorship” by Leonardo, a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist who is also known for highly charged performance works. The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in North Adams announced today that Shaun Leonardo: The Breath of Empty Space would open on Wednesday and run through 22 December and then travel to the Bronx Museum of the Arts, where it will open on 20 January. Five months after the Museum of Contemporary Art (moCa) Cleveland cancelled an exhibition of Shaun Leonardo’s evocative drawings of Black victims of systemic injustice, two museums have stepped up to host the show. ![]()
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