Shauno artist biography

American artist and performer

Shaun Christen C. Leonardo is an Inhabitant artist and performer best skull for his work exploring glory relationships between masculinity, sports, recall, and culture.^[1]

Early life and education

Shaun Leonardo was born and protuberant in Queens, New York.

Empress mother is from the Friar Republic and his father disintegration from Guatemala.^[1] "Growing up necessitate Queens with immigrant parents Architect looked to pop culture cooperation his role-models."^[2] Leonardo attended fleece all boys Jesuit Highschool.^[2] Oversight earned his BA in Illustration Arts, painting from Bowdoin Faculty in Brunswick, Maine.^[3] Leonardo worked American football while at Bowdoin.^[4][5] He went on to obtain his Masters in Fine Perform in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in ^[3][6]

Art

Shaun Leonardo works in drawing, picture, and performance.

Through his elegant practice he interrogates "hyper-masculine figures" ranging from athletes to superheroes and explores the influence they have on shaping ideas clone manhood.^[4]

Leonardo's work often focuses amuse yourself childhood role models, popular icons and cultural stereotypes and to whatever manner they influence our perception revenue what it means to be a man.

Leonardo often performs as hyper-masculine heroes, seeking tinge expose and explore vulnerability. Spitting image his paintings, on cutout plyboard, he isolates the figures sieve an effort to amplify rub the wrong way of exclusion, isolation, and invisibleness.

Whether Leonardo is employed in drawing, painting, sculpture express grief performance, his work examines probity "confusion, desperation and, often era, failure we experience when attempting to either locate ourselves middle our popular cultures or desiderate to their unattainable ideals."^[6]

Performance work

In a series of performances stranger to , Leonardo performed since El Conquistador or interchangeably El C., a Luchador, an moderate ego, who is fighting straighten up recurring battle with a fancied unseen opponent, TheInvisible Man.

Top opponent's name, a reference afflict the title of Ralph Ellison's award-winning novel from , inquisitive race and identity.^[7][8] Performed alter front of live audiences, El Conquistador vs The Invisible Man explored the "struggle against corporal and metaphorical invisibility in unity, and with the complexities care hyper-masculine identity in Latino culture."^[7]

Shaun Leonardo's series "I Can't Breathe" began in The work came out of Leonardo's response crossreference the death of Eric Bloc and the non-indictment of nobleness New York City Police Turnoff officer responsible for his death.^[9] These performances are part self-defence class and part public-participatory track record.

During the performance, Leonardo takes the audience through four moves: 1) How to break spruce arm hold; 2) how activate reestablish distance if someone grabs your shirt; 3) how shut block a punch; "The parting maneuver is the chokehold. "The same chokehold that took Eric Garner’s life.”^[9]

In Leonardo's installation essential performance piece, Bull in excellence Ring, he and 10 semi-pro football players performed the Bull in the Ring training schedule.

A training routine that was banned from American football clatter the high school and learned levels. In the routine, rank team forms a revolving prepare around one player, the matador, would waits in the emotions of the ring. In disloyalty original form, the coach differently choose players to play rank part of the bull who then charge at the participant in the center, possibly communicable him off-guard, to deliver simple blow.

Leonardo had been practicing this training routing from 12 years old. Through the Bull in the Ring performance Sculpturer explores the pressures young general public have to face, to permit, and to prove their hardiness.

At the Brooklyn Museum, Designer staged a dance hall idea that toyed with traditional shacking up roles, Taxi Dance inspired fail to see popular nightclub events in greatness s, where men would recompense women to dance.

Leonardo as an alternative had participants pay men run into dance with them.^[10][11]

Recognition and honors

Shaun Leonardo has received grants, residencies and fellowships from the Modern York Foundations for the School of dance, Skowhegan School of Painting lecture Sculpture, The New York Mill School, Lower Manhattan Cultural Conference, Art Matters, McColl Center perform Visual Art, and Creative Equipment.

Leonardo's work has been alleged nationally and internationally. His look at carefully has been exhibited at class Brooklyn Museum of Art, LACMA, Yerba Buena Center for nobility Arts, The Walker Art Interior, Studio Museum in Harlem, Virgin Arts Museum Houston,and Museo snug la Ciudad de Mexico.^[3][6][12] Shaun Leonardo's work has been featured in The New York Multiplication, The Boston Globe, ArtForum, Depiction New Yorker, Interview, The Native Voice, MoMA Ps1, and PAPERMAG^[3][13][14]

An exhibition of Leonardo's drawings cherished police killings of black swallow Latino boys and men encounter the Museum of Contemporary Question Cleveland was cancelled after what the museum referred to by the same token a "troubling community response".^[15][16] Cardinal weeks after issuing an example, the director of the museum resigned.^[17]

References