the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth

Adrienne Rich
Diving into the Wreck

Maxwell Graham Gallery is honored to present Zoe Leonard’s Display. The exhibition consists of a new body of work by the artist; although the photographs were taken between 1990 and 1994, Leonard only realized them as artworks this year. The tragedy of the photographs is their continued relevance.

These are the first works made by Leonard after Al río / To the River, 2016-2022, a project comprising nearly 500 photographs of the 1,200 mile stretch of the Rio Grande / Río Bravo river, which is used to demarcate the border between Mexico and the United States. Leonard’s artwork testimonies a multitude of the border’s dimensions; nature’s contested resilience, arrests, helicopters overhead, checkpoints viewed remotely on a laptop screen, and countless physical structures from white picket fences to barbed wire concrete blockades intervening on the earth.

The new exhibition Display returns to the historical roots of our predilection towards violence and militarization. The photographed objects span from 300 BC to 1600. Display recalls previous bodies of work made by Leonard which also studied historic objects on display in museums including chastity belts, anatomical models, wigs, the preserved head of a bearded woman. Those objects attested to a legacy of homophobia and misogyny evolving into the brutality of the AIDs crisis; the objects in Display attest to the entrenched conditions of patriarchal and territorial barbarity still spilling blood into the present.

Zoe Leonard’s exhibition Al río / To the river was most recently on view at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa from 2024-2025 and was previously exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; MUDAM, Luxembourg; and Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris in 2022 and 2023. A survey of Leonard’s work was held at the Whitney Museum of America Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2018. A previous survey of photographic work took place at the Fotomuseum Winterthur; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich in 2007 and 2008. Other solo exhibitions have occurred at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Camden Arts Centre, London; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Dia: Beacon, New York; Villa Arson, Nice; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Kunsthalle Basel; Secession, Vienna; The Renaissance Society, Chicago and other museums. Her work has been included in Documenta IX in 1992 and Documenta XII in 2007 and in the Whitney Biennial in 1993, 1997 and 2014 for which she won the Bucksbaum Awar