Artist Talk: Shaun Leonardo

Embodied Performance: An Artist Talk with Shaun Leonardo
SAVE THE DATE! 12.15.21

Join us is learning about the practice of our inaugural Willis artist-in-residence, Shaun Leonardo. The residency is part of our Jazz Temple Project, founded by Winston Willis in 1963, a jazz club and coffeehouse in Cleveland’s University Circle that supported and hosted jazz musicians like John Coltrane and Miles Davis. The club was bombed in 1965.

Description: “Embodied Performance”

Visiting artist Shaun Leonardo will discuss his multi-disciplinary work, which negotiates societal expectations of masculinity, namely definitions surrounding black and brown masculinities, along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. The artist will 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 Artist

Shaun Leonardo’s performance practice, anchored by his work in Assembly—a diversion program for court-involved youth at the Brooklyn-based, arts nonprofit Recess—is participatory and invested in a process of embodiment.

Leonardo is a Brooklyn-based artist from Queens, New York City. His work has been featured at The Guggenheim Museum, the High Line, and New Museum, and recently profiled in the New York Times and CNN. His solo exhibition, The Breath of Empty Space, was recently presented at MICA, MASS MoCA and The Bronx Museum. And his first major public art commission, Between Four Freedoms, recently premiered at Four Freedoms Park Conservancy.

Leonardo recently joined Recess as Co-Director, helping guide the organization’s continuous evolution as an engine of social change.

Website: elcleonardo.com

**About ATNSC: We are a socially engaged artist run retreat, residency, research and exhibition space in the historic Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio. www.atnsc.org

**This project is supported by Cuyahoga Arts & Culture and The Joyce Foundation