Working with photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations, Leslie Hewitt addresses fluid notions of time. Her work oscillates between the illusionary potential of photography and the physical weight of sculpture. In her photographed arrangements, she isolates personal effects and the residue of material culture to consider the fragile nature of everyday life. Her approach to photography and sculpture revisits the still life genre from a post-minimalist/civil-rights perspective. Her geometric compositions, which she frames and crystallizes through the spare assemblage of ordinary things, suggests the porosity between intimate and sociopolitical lives. Whether discreetly arranged in conceptually entangled layers or presented plainly, Hewitt often includes or is inspired by mementos such as family pictures, as well as books and vintage magazines that reference the Black literary and popular cultures of her upbringing. Her practice as an artist points to the mechanisms of the construction of meaning and memory through decisively challenging both by unfolding formal, rather than didactic, connections in her contrapuntal compositions and distinctive take on spatiality.
Registration is FREE for Nasher Members and students; $10 for non-members (includes museum admission). In-person and open to the public. Advance registration required (limited seating available).
About Leslie Hewitt
Hewitt studied at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the Yale University School of Art, and at New York University, where she was a Clark Fellow in the Africana and Visual Culture Studies programs. She was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and the recipient of the 2008 Art Matters research grant to the Netherlands. A selection of recent and forthcoming exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Artists Space in New York; Project Row Houses in Houston; and LA > < ART in Los Angeles. Hewitt has held residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the American Academy in Berlin, Germany amongst others.
Hewitt was part of the faculty at Barnard College in the Department of Art History from 2012 - 2017, where she was actively engaged in the development of the Harlem Semester partnering with the Studio Museum in Harlem. She was a faculty member at The Cooper Union, School of Art from 2017 - 2022, where she co-organized the Intra-Disciplinary Seminar/Public Lecture series with curator/writer Omar Barrada and was involved in the formation of The Augusta Savage Colloquium. She currently holds the position of associate professor at Rice University, School of Humanities, Department of Art.
This program is presented in collaboration with the Augustus Owen Foundation.