March 8, 2018

6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Nathan Cummings Foundation, 475 Tenth Ave., 14th Fl.

Join us for a public-participatory performance where guests will locate intensely contested current affairs within their bodies. Utilizing the shifting perspectives embedded in testimony, news reports, and memory as a backdrop, willing participants will be asked to both recite their own testimonies and translate the narratives of others into performative gestures. While embodying the texts, the group will enact different identities, elusively tying each person in the room to one another.

To attend, you must RSVP.

While this performance is participatory in nature, it is also open to the public for viewing. Those interested in being active participants should arrive promptly at 6pm with a written or memorized testimony related to the prompt: Experiences of Migration.

Shaun Leonardo is a multidisciplinary artist who uses modes of self-portraiture as a means to convey the complexities of masculine identity and question preconceived notions of manhood. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has received awards from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; The New York Studio School; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; Art Matters; New York Foundation for the Arts; McColl Center for Art + Innovation; Franklin Furnace; and The Jerome Foundation. His work has been presented in galleries and institutions, nationally and internationally, and was recently featured in the exhibitions Crossing Brooklyn at Brooklyn Museum, Radical Presence at Studio Museum in Harlem, and Between History and the Body at The 8th Floor Gallery. Leonardo’s current collaborative work Mirror / Echo / Tilt is funded by Creative Capital. He is also a current artist in the Smack Mellon Studio Program, Brooklyn, NY.

Photo courtesy of the Shaun Leonardo.

ARTISTS