Leonard’s works often capture these sorts of societal shifts and changes (perhaps this is an inevitability when one’s practice involves patient, long-term looking). For INTERVIEW Magazine she speaks to the “different city” that she inhabited in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the changing reality for working artists, and how her personal past and the political present are merging in her newest body of work (In the Wake, a series of photographs and sculptures which opens this month at New York’s Hauser & Wirth gallery). In conversation, as in her work, Leonard is extremely generous. She wants to give you something to take with you, a little piece of how she sees things. She wants to give you a vantage point, a window, through which you can gaze at the world with intention, and through which, if you look closely enough, you might see a changed place, an alternative, even an opportunity for justice.
The Eighties in New York were not like, “You’re in the art world.” I never heard the term “art world” until I was in my thirties, and I was like, “What are you guys talking about?” It’s the world, and we all live in the world! I would go to a poetry reading, I would go to an art opening, I would go to a loft party. You would end up at a film shoot. I really loved music and went to a lot of clubs to see bands and dance. I loved going out. It just felt like those lines weren’t so segregated and drawn. And the same in some ways with the straightness and queerness. I mean, there was a whole gay world that I got to know better later, but at a place like the Mudd Club, it was very polyamorous in a certain way.