In Focus: Joanne Leonard

Joanne Leonard grew up in mid-century Hollywood, surrounded by the intellectual and artistic energy of émigrés and creatives. From an early age, she was steeped in culture and encouraged to explore the arts - experiences that would profoundly shape her lifelong work as a visual artist. Her photography and collage explore the intimate, often overlooked aspects of women’s lives, memory, and personal history, while also engaging with larger movements in feminism, civil rights, and social justice. Through candid storytelling and layered visual techniques, Leonard’s work challenges the boundaries between the personal and political, the private and public, the seen and the felt.

HackelBury: Where did you grow up, and what are some of your most significant childhood memories?

Joanne Leonard: I grew up in Hollywood — and heard stories from my mother about the time when I was a baby and Marlene Dietrich held me in her arms. It became part of my memory of childhood from the stories my mother told and the glamorous photo we have of Dietrich holding me.

HB: How did your upbringing influence your career as an artist?

JL: My parents’ friends were, like my dad, refugees from Nazi Germany who had settled in Hollywood. Intellectual conversation swirled about as my sisters and I were growing up — much of it centered on the arts. We also went to exhibitions and concerts, so it was a culturally rich environment. Our mother was a child psychologist and set an example of a woman focused on more than home and family. An utterly memorable art-related event of my childhood, aged eight, was standing in line in 1948 with my Berlin educated dad to see the exhibition “Masterpieces from the Berlin Museums” — an art-viewing experience I remember vividly to this day.

Read more about the exhibition here

HB: When did you first pick up a camera, and what drew you to photography?

JL: As a child, I sent away for a camera advertised on a cereal box — “send in one dollar and a Wheaties box top and get a Brownie camera.” I was thrilled with the little Brownie camera I bought for myself.

HB: When did you realize you wanted to be an artist?

JL: I drew pictures as a child without thinking about “what I would be” as an adult. In college I took classes in social sciences, but I also took art classes every semester. It was when I graduated that I became more certain of focusing on art. However, I’d had some exciting moments in childhood where my ideas and creations were celebrated. One father bought a painting of mine from a school display and gave me a cheque for $5.00. As a young teen, a story I wrote was published in American Girl magazine. Later, I won a national Scholastic prize for a ceramic bottle I made in a school crafts class. Winning the prize was memorable, exciting, and influential.

HB: Did you study photography formally, or was your approach more self-directed?

JL: A bit of both. Photography wasn’t taught in the art department at my university, so I enrolled in a vocational program at a city college. That’s where I first learned to develop film and use a 4x5 press type camera. Later, I moved to Boston and bought darkroom equipment with earnings from my first job shelving books in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology library.

HB: Were your parents supportive of your choice to pursue art as a career?

JL: Yes. Their friends were artists and musicians, so they saw these as legitimate fields. They had always encouraged artistic pursuits. I doubt I would have become an artist without their strong support and interest in the arts. My mother loved the arts, and my father’s work was in the arts — he sold classical music recordings and managed a chamber music concert series.

HB: What factors led to your involvement in the Women’s Movement and Civil RightsMovement?

JL: I had already graduated when anti-war protests erupted in 1962. I met an artist and began to live with him in a warehouse district. Outside our windows were homes of people living in tremendous poverty. I began photographing from the second story windows. As I met neighbors and attended meetings for protest marches, I was invited into their homes. In the 1960s, when BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) was being built, protests erupted about the lack of jobs for minority workers. I participated in and photographed these marches. My interest in feminism and the women’s movement came later. In the late ‘60s, I met Miriam Schapiro and Lucy Lippard while teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. They began to write and speak about my work. It was a very exciting time for me. A pivotal publication for me was Eleanor Munro’s Originals: American Women Artists (1979), which highlighted forgotten but once-recognized women artists. That book made me realize that history is not a neutral lens — but a specific selection driven by norms, ideas and selections and even eliminations dictated by powerful cultural force.

HB: What were the most pressing social issues for you at the time?

JL: Civil rights workers were being killed in Mississippi. Roe v. Wade passed in 1973, bringing women’s reproductive rights into focus. The anti-war movement against the Vietnam War was also prominent in my thoughts and in the protests I joined.

HB: What was it like being part of a counter-culture movement as an artist?

JL: It wasn’t obvious in the ‘60s and ‘70s if art could make a difference in such a troubled world. I still feel that tension today. As a teacher, I tried to raise questions and help students navigate between their concerns about the world and their desire to make art. Was it subversive to focus on women’s lives at the time? I once gave a lecture on women photographers in my “History of Photography” class, and a student later wrote: “Mentioning women photographers was fine, but a whole lecture on women was ridiculous.”

HB: When and why did you create your own darkroom, making “a room of one’s own” to quote Virginia Woolf?

JL: I’ve had a darkroom in my living space since I was a student. My first was in a closet in the stairwell of a house in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. My school days were long, and I didn’t have time to use the program’s darkroom, so working at night at home was essential. I processed photo paper in trays on a shelf and washed prints in the kitchen sink. Later, I made similar makeshift darkrooms. In my last California home, I finally had running water. When I moved to Michigan in the late ‘70s and raised my daughter Julia, I built my first truly good darkroom with water and temperature controls. Community darkrooms existed, but using one meant paying fees  and childcare — it was easier to work while my daughter slept. To build that darkroom, I paid for the work myself — and I’ve said, “I built a darkroom when I could have remodelled a kitchen.” Without knowing Virginia Woolf’s essay at the time, I now see I always understood I needed a space of my own to become the person I believed I could be. Today (now that the computer is where I print my photographs) the one-time darkroom in that same home is a basement storage area for my artwork. 

HB: What drew you to working within the ‘intimate documentary’ style, and why was it important for you to document the intimacy of women’s lives?

JL: In artwork I’d come to know growing up, if there was a focus on women, it was most often as subjects. of the male gaze. These did not often reflect on the daily lives of women—and particularly did not reflect the world from the women’s own perspectives. The “documentary” photography I knew were the important photographic records made during the years of economic depression in the U.S., which focused on economic struggles as a result of factors such as land erosion, failed crops, and social issues.

There was no focus on the disappointment in failed relationships or the seeming treacheries of one’s own body. It is now well known that Frida Kahlo was an exception—dealing in the 1930s with the treachery of her philandering husband and of her pregnancy loss from a miscarriage—but this work was not known to me until the “retrieval” of her work by feminist art scholars in publications in the 1970s—after I made my visual response to my own miscarriage in 1973. There were two women who had a big influence on my choice of subject matter. I had loved the paintings of Mary Cassatt for the intimacy in her paintings of her sister and family, and the work of Käthe Kollwitz, who depicted women and children—especially as the women resist separation and other terrors of war.

HB: What compelled you to create such deeply personal autobiographical work?

JL: Having a psychologist for a mother was pretty influential. Speaking about one’s personal and intimate feelings was something our family did because my mother was tuned in to conversations about one’s inner life and encouraged such conversation. In the 1990s—when I was attempting, through photographs, collage, and text, to make art about my mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s disease—I came to know the work of Charlotte Salomon. Her work was a model of an artist finding means to express terrible turmoil and resist the suicides that had taken the lives of her grandmother and mother. Her work incorporated text within her enormously compelling diaristic drawings—over 700 drawings that make up her work she titled “Art and Theater.”

HB: How did you gain the trust of the West Oakland community to allow you to photograph them?

JL: I lived in West Oakland for 8 years. From the beginning of my photographing there, I gave my neighbors photographs I’d taken of them. That might seem something obvious for a photographer to do—but I feel it is something I actually learned in school from a wonderful teacher, the photographer and anthropologist John Collier Jr. He was the most important teacher I had—and he suggested that the way to learn about your photo subjects and gain their trust was to give prints of your photographs to your subject—also to ask them about the subjects or objects in the photographs—instead of “interviewing” by asking questions, just ask the viewer what she/he sees in the photographs. From that idea, I learned so much about my own photographs and their possible meanings.

HB: You have spoken about turning to collage during moments of crisis and change. What does collage offer that photography alone does not?

JL: There are moments when it would be impossible to photograph—when one is too involved, too close to the subject, or when circumstances were overwhelming or even dangerous. A camera cannot always record a moment of one’s own shock or crises. Instead, I’ve tried to represent the moments that have already passed by suggesting the feelings or the ambiance through photo-collage. Sometimes I have a photograph, like a sleeping figure on a bed, photographs from relatively tranquil moments—that take on meanings more fraught and suggestive through the collage I’ve added to the photograph’s surfaces. Collage allows a dialog, conversation, or push and pull—a layering on of the past onto images from the present—a representation of dreams and even nightmares with collage layered onto scenes made in the light of day.

HB: Your Newspaper Diaries series brings together private and public life through layered images—will you talk about the process of deconstructing and reassembling narratives?

JL: Many times a week, I clip photographs from the morning newspaper. This clipping amounts to something like diary keeping because they represent the “news of the day.” I collect such images and then go on a search for parallel images in books. This search is a process a bit like diary keeping. The resulting work is not always related to “narrative” but amounts to a kind of “compare and contrast,” a “past and present,” “a real moment” (from the news) and perhaps “imaginary moment” from artwork of the past, from which, perhaps, a viewer can find an implied narrative.

HB: Your visual language includes techniques such as collage and scrolls, both of which have deep symbolic ties to politics and religion. What prompted you to start working with scrolls?

JL: Maybe scrolls offer a “long form,” like an essay, instead of a paragraph. The stories and meanings can be expanded over a larger space, a longer timeline. I’m much inspired by looking at medieval works—particularly diptychs and triptychs. These forms are sometimes hinged and have doors that fold over the artwork, then open to reveal the imagery inside. These forms also contain more suggestion of time and story unfolding than images constrained in a square or narrow rectangle. The triptych form is much associated with religion, and I think it is my borrowing of diptych and triptych forms that gives some of my work any religious aspect they may have.

HB: How did you balance motherhood, teaching, and your artistic practice?

JL: My daughter was born in 1975, and I had taught part-time at Mills College in Oakland and at various visiting positions around the Bay Area—San Francisco Art Institute, UC Davis, San Jose State College, UC Berkeley’s extension course program—piecing together a living from all this part-time work. I had liked teaching part-time before my daughter was born, but after her birth, it became clear I needed a “real job” (full-time with benefits), and I began to apply for full-time posts in 1978. I moved in 1978 to teach at the University of Michigan, and it was a difficult time. I had applied for jobs so I could move closer to my family on the East Coast. However, the new job took me from California to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, but it was a good position with a salary so I could travel to see my family. At present, I’m Emerita faculty—I’d become a Distinguished University Professor before I retired in 2008. 

I can’t really say that I have ever “balanced” teaching, motherhood, and creative work. It has felt much more like a tug of war than a balancing act. Many times, my daughter lacked my attention and the leisurely time together we wished for. I felt I needed to keep each of the arenas—job, family, art— going so as to get promoted and tenured within the university system, have the income we needed, be recognized for artwork I showed, and my success in showing was gratifying. I didn’t fail, but I cannot boast of successes in every arena, particularly in the pleasures of relaxing and being playful within my small mother/daughter family unit. There were things I wish had been different. 

It might be important to interject that the art world is not a “fair” place. During this time, I applied repeatedly for grants, where it is now well documented that male applicants had an enormous advantage over women applicants. Of course, I was an educated, white woman of European descent and had my own series of advantages and privileges, but it does seem important to mention the historic and cultural milieu of the decades in which this biographic story is being told.

HB: How significant was it for you when your work Romanticism is Ultimately Fatal was included in H.W. Janson’s History of Art (1986), especially since so few women artists were included?

JL: Romanticism is Ultimately Fatal—a horse carrying a couple as riders is seen through a window—the image of horse and riders are the collage elements. These elements come from an illustration by the renowned illustrator N.C. Wyeth—from a book of Arthurian myths called The Boy’s King Arthur—and the window is a photograph by me. The publication of this work in Janson’s History of Art was VERY IMPORTANT. The book was famous because it was a very widely used textbook, but also infamous because it became the bête noire of the women’s movement in the ‘70s. It was a book of art history published for 20 years and widely used in teaching, but a book that contained not a single work of art by a woman artist! I was being considered for promotion about the time Janson’s revised edition was published, and likely my inclusion in that important volume helped me win the promotion. Also, I felt it a great honor to be among the 20 women added when Anthony Janson revised his father’s famous/infamous book.

HB: Journal of a Miscarriage was originally censored from exhibitions, yet has now been acquired by the Whitney and the V&A. How do you feel about this shift, and do you think the art world is slow to recognize certain artists?

JL: Of course, many artists over centuries have been neglected in their own day and heralded later— years or even decades after they have died. So, on one hand, I feel very fortunate to have had the recognition and successes I have had—to have lived long enough to have had the good attention my work has had. But in giving you these notes on my history, I’ve already mentioned areas where things did not go easily, and some of these difficulties were structural and institutional. I’m very pleased indeed, after the work of so many women who created the ‘70s movement of women in the arts (i.e., Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock), that today there are more museums collecting work by women artists of my generation.

HB: Recurring themes in your work—twins, women, separation, family—are deeply autobiographical and expose personal vulnerabilities. How do you feel when looking back on these pieces now?

JL: I think this question may be a version of one I’ve been asked in interviews—do I regret providing the degree of personal revelation that is available about me and my work? If that is the question, I can answer “no,” I do not have regrets of this sort. I’m pleased if in some way my story is of use to younger artists, particularly young women artists. The focus on women still feels important to me and now helps my work find audiences and archives that want this contribution. I have a number of photographs of twins—my twin cousins, my twin nieces and nephews, as both my sisters and uncle have twin children. Maybe some of my collage strategies (with their pairings and their themes of compare and contrast) are also “twinnings” of a sort. My ongoing series called “Newspaper Diary” features images that are twins or pairs (a news photo and an image in a book)—so the theme of twins might be said to be prominent in my work, right up to the present moment.

HB: You’ve described the “tension between realism and idealisation, photography and fantasy” as being central to your work. Can you expand on this idea?

JL: Photography is sometimes thought of as unmediated—created by a machine and not subject to the feelings and perspectives of the maker. I have celebrated and worked with the kind of “documentary photography” that is seen as objective and factual. However, in truth, even with every effort at “objectivity,” photographers focus on subject matter that comes with cultural “baggage,” even when the photographer intends a kind of information-gathering photographic practice that records with dispassion. As we’ve been discussing, I’ve also “altered” my photographs—largely through the use of collage—in order to suggest my own dreams and fantasies. It’s not easy to maintain a hold on photography as “factual” once one is involved with making changes to the images. That is the “tension” that exists between “photography and fantasy.” There are also factions (driven by teaching philosophies or curatorial bent) within the world of both teaching institutions and cultural institutions (museums, galleries, history of art publishers) that favor either the factual and “pure” in photography or the fantastic and creative in photography. So the ideas and tensions you ask about play out in various arenas.

HB: How would you like people to respond to your work?

JL: I’d be happy if my work inspires other artists in any way that feeds their own work and ideas. Perhaps I could also say I’d be pleased if my work raises questions and sets viewers on a quest for answers especially answers that could lead to more tranquillity and equality. I’m not someone at war with the ideas of democracy, equity, and inclusion! (DEI being an apex of contemporary politics and conflict in the USA today.)

HB: Where do you feel most at peace?

JL: Wherever and whenever I’m with my family and loved ones.