Shaun Leonardo
Overlooked Intimacies: A Retrospective

As part of The Jazz Temple Project, we are honored to host artist Shaun Leonardo, the inaugural recipient of The Willis Residency–named after founder of the coffeehouse and club, the Jazz Temple, Winston Willis.

The Jazz Temple provided hospitality and space to experiment and to gather in Cleveland’s University Circle. As an interracial gathering space, after two years of existence, it was destroyed by a pipe bomb in August of 1965.

To Learn more or to share your memory of the Jazz Temple:
www.thejazztempleproject.art

The Willis Residency supports artists whose work lives at the intersection of socially engaged art, experimental art and in some way investigates Black and Indigenous masculinities.

As the inaugural artist-in-residence, this exhibition explores the history of the artist’s practice and invites the audience to make meanings across the past and present–here and now.

**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.
elcleonardo.com

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**About ATNSC: We are an urban retreat, research, residency and exhibition space in the Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood
www.atnsc.org

This project is supported by The Joyce Foundation