Joanne Leonard

Joanne Leonard: An Intimate Document

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to present an online exhibition of Joanne Leonard’s (b. 1940, Los Angeles, CA) compelling photographs of West Oakland. In these pictures, Leonard portrays her neighborhood and its residents with both sensitivity and the eye of an artist, imbuing the commonplace with beauty.  The exhibition will showcase a rare selection of vintage black and white prints produced in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Leonard moved to West Oakland shortly after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1960s, where she received a degree in social science.  By that time, the West Oakland community had seen a series of urban renewal efforts followed by years of economic decay, displacement, and neglect.  Amidst these troubled times, Leonard was an active community builder, fostering relationships that granted her close access to document her community with a specific veneration, resulting in photographs of universal beauty.  As Leonard states,  “the intimate realities of life as they are lived and allowing them to touch and be touched by the world at large.”

Joanne Leonard is the Diane M. Kirkpatrick and Griselda Pollack Distinguished University Professor of Art and Women's Studies and a faculty associate in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. She completed her 31st year on the Faculty at the University of Michigan and her 40th year of life as a college professor in May of 2009, when she retired from teaching. Her artistic and scholarly life continues with a focus on feminist photography and visual memoir. During her tenure at the University of Michigan, Prof. Leonard was Director of the Program in Visual Culture at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender for three years.  Her photography and collage pieces are often exhibited nationally and internationally.  Leonard’s photographs have been featured in exhibitions at major museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), and are also held in the collections of such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA), The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, MO), the International Center of Photography (New York, NY), and the National Museum of Woman in the Arts (Washington, DC). 

The monograph, Being In Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir, was published in 2008 and surveys the artist's seminal career.  In 2022, she was featured in the lecture series, Collecting Conversations: Five Women in American Photography, organized by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Recently, her work was included in the survey exhibition, The ‘70s Lens: Reimaging Documentary Photography at the National Gallery of Art (10/6/2024 – 04/06/2025).