NORTH ADAMS, Massachusetts: The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art has announced the exhibition Shaun Leonardo: The Breath of Empty Space through December 22, 2020.
Through his work, the Brooklyn-based artist addresses how the mediated images of systemic oppression and violence against Black and Brown young men and boys in the United States have shaped our fear, empathy, and perception. Through a series of intimate drawings based on images widely disseminated in the press and popular media and accessed from his own recollection of these tragedies, Leonardo applies the additive nature of drawing—a rigorous visual editing—to explore the reductive nature of memory, powerfully addressing how time and the endless cycling of images in the media affect what we remember, and what we forget.