Zoe Leonard: Archivist of Feeling

Zoe Leonard, TV Wheelbarrow, 2001, dye transfer print, 20 in. × 16 in. Collection of the New York Public Library; Funds from the Estate of Leroy A. Moses, 2005.

Never have I wanted to touch a photograph as badly as I wanted to touch Zoe Leonard’s Red Wall 2001/2003 (Leonard typically includes two dates with each photograph, the first signaling when the photo was taken, the second when it was printed). It’s an image of such saturated—such tactile—redness that it was, for a beat, difficult to accept that it was only a representation of a wall, flat and smooth and framed. Red Wall is a minimalist monochrome wet dream that inspires a maximalist yearning—an outsized, outrageous need.

Zoe Leonard, “I want a president,” 1992.

Leonard is a photographer and a sculptor. She is also an activist, and her Coalition to Unleash Power () serves as a model for conscientious, personally risky political involvement. Her samizdat poem “I want a president,” originally written to celebrate Eileen Myles’s 1992 “openly female” (in the poet’s words) run for the presidency, was originally meant to run in a small journal that shut down right before publication. In 2006, it was printed as an insert postcard in the journal , and in 2016, it appeared on a billboard at the foot of the High Line. “I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president,” the poem begins. It ends, “I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown. Always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker. Always a liar, always a thief, and never caught.”