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).
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