Zoe Leonard: Al río / To the River
October 2024 through July 6, 2025
Known for her work across photography, sculpture, and installation, Zoe Leonard is among the most acclaimed artists of her generation. Balancing conceptual clarity with a distinctly personal vision, Leonard probes the politics of representation and display, and invites us to contemplate the role photography plays in constructing our reality. Contrary to the popular notion, first articulated by Henri Cartier-Bresson, that a photographer’s goal is to capture the “decisive moment,” Leonard presents alternative possibilities for photography, eschewing fixity for an awareness of how our positions, personal and political, shape and are shaped by technologies of image-making. As Leonard has written, “Where you look from is always half the picture.” In this way, Leonard’s work shares an affinity with many works in Chinati’s permanent collection, especially Donald Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, which heighten our awareness and invite us to reconsider our relationship to the world we inhabit.
Al río / To the River, exhibited for the first time in the Americas at Chinati, is a major new work by Leonard. Produced over a period of six years, beginning in 2016, the work poses the question: “What does it mean to ask a body of water to perform a political task?” Consisting of photographs taken along the 1,200 mile stretch where the Rio Grande/Río Bravo is used to demarcate the international boundary between Mexico and the United States, Al río follows the river from the border cities of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, to the Gulf of Mexico. The workchallenges notions of fixity, photographic and otherwise, in a variety of overlapping contexts, including the Treaty of Guadalupe, which established the river as the international border in 1848 and the Rio Grande Rectification of 1933, when the two countries began a coordinated attempt to restrict the river’s natural meander, among many others.
Using seriality, shifting perspectives, and multiple approaches to the photographic medium, Al río presents alternatives to the often politically sensational imagery of the river and the US / Mexico borderlands. The work takes on added dimension at Chinati, where it is installed across three buildings of the former Camp Albert, a US military base established in 1911 to patrol the US/Mexico border. Camp Albert, an early version of Homeland Security and the Border Patrol, whose current Big Bend Section Headquarters sit adjacent to Chinati’s grounds, was followed by Camp Marfa and later Fort D.A. Russell. Leonard’s exhibition of Al río / To the River at Chinati invites us to consider these histories; Donald Judd’s later transformation of the site for the purposes of exhibiting art; and the contemporary realities of climate change, economic injustice, border militarization, global displacement, and immigration. Leonard’s attention to context and artistic framing characterizes her unique gift for installation and asks important questions about the possibilities of art in democratic society.
Caitlin Murray, Director of the Chinati Foundation
The opening of Al río / To the River at the Chinati Foundation— its first institutional presentation in the Americas—follows its debut at Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (2022), and subsequent exhibitions at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris Musées (2022) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2023). Hauser & Wirth presented a related gallery exhibition Excerpts from Al río in New York in 2022, as did Capitain Petzel in Berlin (2022) and Galleria Raffaella Cortese in Milan (2023/2024).
Support
This exhibition was made possible with support from Hauser & Wirth, Kathleen Irvin Loughlin and Christopher Loughlin, Celeste and Anthony Meier, Lisa and John Runyon, Nancy and Rod Sanders, and Texas Commission on the Arts. Additional support has been provided by the Chinati Foundation’s Director’s Circle.
Zoe Leonard
Zoe Leonard was born in 1961 in Liberty, New York; she currently lives and works in New York, New York and Marfa, Texas. The Chinati Foundation was honored to host, “This is where I was,” a spoken word performance in 2010; and from 2013 to 2015, 100 North Nevill Street, a large-scale installation in which she turned Chinati’s Ice Plant into a camera obscura. Leonard’s work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally since the early 1990s, including significant exhibitions at Dia:Beacon (2008-2011), Documenta IX (1992) and XII (2007), Fotomuseum Winterthur (2007-08), and the Museum of Modern Art (2015); “Survey,” a career retrospective, was presented at MoCA Los Angeles and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, in 2018. Leonard was a finalist for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2010 and was awarded the Whitney Museum Bucksbaum Award in 2014. In 2020, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow.
Installation views of Zoe Leonard: Al río / To the River, The Chinati Foundation, Marfa 2024. Photos by Alex Marks. © Zoe Leonard.