Leslie Hewitt

Guna S. Mundheim Visual Arts Fellow - Class of Spring 2012

Artist

American Academy Project: New Work
Current Location: New York

Biography

Leslie Hewitt is an artist living in New York City. With her work in photography and other media, she tries to restructure pieces of American history by inserting people, things and icons forgotten by the times and gives them new purpose in the present. Hewitt graduated from The Cooper Union's School of Art in 2000 and went on to earn an MFA from Yale University in 2004. From 2001-2003, she studied Africana Studies and Cultural Studies at New York University. Hewitt has held residencies at The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Project Row Houses and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, among others. She has displayed her work in exhibitions in a number of American and international galleries. Her work is in the public collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, the Yale Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, among others. Hewitt was represented in MoMA's New Photography 2009, a thematic presentation of significant recent work in photography that examines and expands the conventional definitions of the medium. In 2009-2010 Hewitt was in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the recipient of the prestigious 2010 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Individual Artist Grant and the 2010 Joyce Alexander Wein Prize.

American Academy Project

New Work

Selected Works

 

Lecture Summary

Published in Arts and Culture

On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance

Artist Leslie Hewitt's dimensional interrogations of sculpture, photography, and, now -- film

Artist Leslie Hewitt's photographs are somewhat like mis en abymes, or, as the French writer Andre Gide believed, “self-reflexive embeddings,” which are achieved by being scenes within scenes. Her aesthetic inquiries have taken her from the physical space of sculpture, through the world of photography, to the ethereal yet somehow very present world of film. »