Leslie Hewitt facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Leslie Hewitt
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Leslie Hewitt Exhibition at Power Plant
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| Born | 1977 (age 47–48) |
| Education | Yale University, M.F.A New York University, Africana Studies/Cultural Studies The Cooper Union For the Advancement of Science and Art, B.F.A. |
| Alma mater | Yale University |
Leslie Hewitt, born in 1977 in Saint Albans, Queens, is an American artist. She creates amazing visual art using photography, sculptures, and special art setups.
Contents
Learning and Growing: Leslie Hewitt's Education
Leslie Hewitt was born in 1977 in Saint Albans, Queens, New York City. She went to art school at the Cooper Union and earned her first degree in 2000. Later, she got a master's degree from Yale University in 2004. She also studied African American history and culture at New York University.
Hewitt has been part of special art programs, called residencies. These include programs at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
About Leslie Hewitt's Art
Leslie Hewitt's art explores stories about politics, society, and personal feelings. She uses photography, sculptures, and art installations that are set up in specific places. Her artworks can be small or as big as billboards. These large photos are often in wooden frames that lean against a wall. This makes you wonder if it's a sculpture or a photograph.
Hewitt is interested in how we use images to remember things. She also looks at how we remember big events from the past. She often uses items from black popular culture from the 1970s and 1980s. You might see old VHS tapes, books by authors like Alex Haley, or even graffiti in her photos and art setups.
A Busy Career: Exhibitions and Awards
Leslie Hewitt has shown her art in many places and won several awards. In 2008, she was part of the Whitney Biennial, a big art show, with her piece Make it Plain. She also received a grant to study Dutch still-life paintings in the Netherlands. She wanted to see how these paintings from the time of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade connected to her work.
From 2009 to 2010, Hewitt was a fellow at Harvard University. There, she studied how the camera obscura (an early camera) worked. She used it to explore how cultural memories are formed. She would arrange objects and photograph them many times, capturing how light and gravity changed them.
In 2012, she won the Guna S. Mundheim Berlin Prize in the Visual Arts. She also had a solo art show called Leslie Hewitt: Sudden Glare of the Sun in St. Louis. In 2014, she received another award, the USA Artists Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz Fellow.
Her art is part of important collections in museums. These include the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2016, her work was shown at the Guggenheim Museum again. She also had a solo show with works made with filmmaker Bradford Young at Sculpture Center in New York.
Leslie Hewitt's Artworks
Riffs on Real Time (2006-2009)
This art series features 10 unique photographs. Hewitt started this series in 2002. In these photos, she places a main image, often from American media, on top of a book or another document. This creates a "frame" around the image. Then, she photographs this whole setup on a wooden or carpeted floor, adding another layer.
This way of working shows how different materials can create a cultural identity. Hewitt often uses documents that look worn or used. She might place a snapshot of American life on top of a book with folded pages. These layered setups are photographed directly on the floor. This shows how her art connects to everyday spaces and human life.
Midday (2009)
Hewitt's Midday series asks questions about the past and how it connects to today. In one piece, an orange sits next to a copy of Manchild in the Promised Land. This book tells about the challenges for African Americans in New York in the 1950s. Like her other works, Hewitt places things from the past with newer photos. This brings them into a modern setting.
Untitled (Structures)
The exhibition Untitled (Structures) (2013) was a team effort. Leslie Hewitt worked with filmmaker Bradford Young and producer Karen Chien. This project is a series of short, silent films made in 2012. The films show places where famous civil rights photos were taken in the 1950s and 1960s. These places were in Chicago, Memphis, and parts of Arkansas. These areas changed a lot because of the Great Migration.
The films show small details from old photos, like a bent body or a crack in stairs. These details are then filmed again in the same real locations. Hewitt explained that in the dual-screen video, you can look at one screen or the other, but your eyes have to see both. She combines the idea of a still life with the camera's power to "shift the view of the world and hold it still."
Still-life series (2013)
In 2013, Hewitt released a series of photographs displayed in tilted maple wood frames. These frames made the images look like objects in a gallery. In Untitled (Perception), 2013, a wooden block rests on a stack of books. One of the books is a collection of essays by James Baldwin. The wooden block matches the artwork's frame.
She also created untitled works with two free-standing walls leaning against the gallery walls. These simple objects were made of drywall and wood. They looked like the gallery walls themselves. This showed how her art connected to the physical space around it.
Where to See Her Art: Exhibitions
Leslie Hewitt has had many solo art shows in museums and galleries. Some of her notable solo shows include:
- Make It Plain (2006) in Los Angeles
- Momentum Series 15: Leslie Hewitt (2011) in Boston
- Sudden Glare of the Sun (2012) in St. Louis
- New Pictures: Leslie Hewitt, A Series of Projections (2016) in Minneapolis
- Collective Stance: Leslie Hewitt (2016) in Toronto, Canada
- Contemporary Focus: Leslie Hewitt (2018) at The Menil Collection
- Leslie Hewitt (2022-2023) at Dia Bridgehampton, Bridgehampton, New York
She has also been part of many group shows, including the Whitney Biennial (2008) and A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration (2022).
