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 1977) is an American artist. She creates art using photography, sculptures, and special art setups. Her work often explores history, memory, and how we understand the past through images.
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About Leslie Hewitt
Leslie Hewitt was born in 1977 in Saint Albans, Queens, New York City. She went to the Cooper Union's School of Art and later earned a master's degree from Yale University. She also studied Africana Studies and Cultural Studies at New York University.
Hewitt has spent time at several art programs. These include the Core Program at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. These programs helped her develop her unique artistic style.
How Her Art Explores History
Leslie Hewitt is part of a generation that learned about the Civil Rights Movement through pictures and stories. She grew up when big political changes were happening. This experience shaped how she sees the world and how she uses photography in her art.
She is interested in how much we rely on images to remember things. She also explores how our shared memories of past events are formed and kept alive. Her art shows how personal and group memories connect and influence each other.
Her Artistic Career
Hewitt's art tells stories about politics, society, and personal experiences. She uses photography, sculptures, and special art installations. Her artworks can be small or as large as billboards. These big photos often lean against a wall in wooden frames. This makes them feel like both sculptures and traditional photographs.
She uses everyday objects and personal items in her art. These can include old VHS tapes of movies, written notes with drawings, or books by famous authors. These items often appear in her photos or are part of her art setups. She often uses things from black popular culture from the 1970s and 1980s.
Key Projects and Exhibitions
Leslie Hewitt has shown her art in many places and received important 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 travel to the Netherlands. There, she studied old Dutch paintings from the time of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. She looked at these paintings at the Rijksmuseum.
From 2009 to 2010, Hewitt was a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute. During this time, she studied the history of the camera obscura. This is an early type of camera. She used it to explore how cultural memories are formed. She created temporary still-life scenes and photographed them many times. This helped her capture how light and how we see things change over time.
In 2012, she received the Guna S. Mundheim Berlin Prize in the Visual Arts. A solo exhibition of her work, Leslie Hewitt: Sudden Glare of the Sun, was shown at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. In 2014, she received another award, the USA Artists Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz Fellow in Visual Arts.
Her art is part of the permanent collections of many famous museums. These include the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Her work is also at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2016, her art was featured in an exhibition called Photo-Poetics: An Anthology at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Leslie Hewitt: Collective Stance was a solo exhibition in 2016. It included artworks she made with filmmaker Bradford Young. This show was presented at SculptureCenter in Queens, New York. Today, Leslie Hewitt is represented by the contemporary art gallery Perrotin.
Her Artworks
Riffs on Real Time (2006-2009)
This exhibition showed 10 photographs from a series Leslie Hewitt started in 2002. These photos are like modern still-life paintings. They explore how different objects put together can show a cultural identity.
In these photos, a main image, often from American media, is placed on a larger book or document. This creates a frame around the image. Then, this whole arrangement is photographed on a wooden or carpeted floor. This adds another layer, or "frame," to the picture.
Each photo includes an object that shows it has been used, like a worn book or a folded magazine. On top of this, a snapshot of American life is placed. These layered setups are photographed directly on the floor. The floor acts as a base for the artwork. This shows how Hewitt's art is connected to human-made spaces.
Midday (2009)
Leslie Hewitt's art often asks questions about the past and how it connects to the present. In her series Midday, she placed a mandarin orange next to a copy of the book Manchild in the Promised Land. This book tells about the challenges faced by African Americans in New York in the 1950s.
Like her other works, Midday puts items from the past next to more recent photographs. This brings them into a modern setting.
Untitled (Structures)
The exhibition Untitled (Structures) (2013) was a collaboration with filmmaker Bradford Young and producer Karen Chien. It featured short, silent films created in 2012. These films show places where famous Civil Rights photographs were taken in the 1950s and 1960s. These locations 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 person bending or a crack in stairs. These details are then filmed again in the same places where the original photos were taken. The artworks are shown as a dual-channel video installation. This means two videos are projected at the same time. Hewitt explained that viewers can look at one or the other, but their eyes have to see both.
Still-life series (2013)
In 2013, Hewitt released a series of photographs displayed at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. These photos were shown in tilted wooden frames. The frames made the images look like objects in a gallery.
In one piece, Untitled (Perception), a wooden block rests on a stack of three books. One of the books is a collection of essays by James Baldwin. The wooden block matches the artwork's wooden frame.
Another artwork nearby included two free-standing walls leaning against the gallery architecture. These simple objects were made of drywall and wood. They were designed to match the texture and size of the gallery walls. They added to the physical feel of the exhibition.
Exhibitions
Leslie Hewitt has had many solo shows at galleries and museums. These include:
- Make It Plain (2006) at LAXART Gallery, Los Angeles
- Momentum Series 15: Leslie Hewitt (2011) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
- Sudden Glare of the Sun (2012) at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
- New Pictures: Leslie Hewitt, A Series of Projections (2016) at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts
- Collective Stance: Leslie Hewitt (2016) at The Power Plant, 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 exhibitions, such as the Whitney Biennial (2008) and A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration (2022).
