Shaun El C. Leonardo is an American artist and performer best known for his work exploring the relationships between masculinity, sports, race, and culture.
Shaun Leonardo works in drawing, painting, and performance. Through his artistic practice he interrogates "hyper-masculine figures" ranging from athletes to superheroes and explores the influence they have on shaping ideas of manhood. Leonardo's work often focuses on childhood role models, popular icons and cultural stereotypes and how they influence our perception of what it means to be a man. Leonardo often performs as hyper-masculine heroes, seeking to expose and explore vulnerability. In his paintings, on cutout plywood, he isolates the figures in an effort to amplify feelings of exclusion, isolation, and invisibility. Whether Leonardo is working in drawing, painting, sculpture or performance, his work examines the "confusion, desperation and, often times, failure we experience when attempting to either locate ourselves within our popular cultures or aspire to their unattainable ideals."
Performance work
In a series of performances from 2004 to 2007, Leonardo performed as El Conquistador or interchangeably El C., a Luchador, an alter ego, who is fighting a recurring battle with a fictional unseen opponent, TheInvisible Man. His opponent's name, a reference to the title of Ralph Ellison's award-winning novel from 1952, exploring race and identity. Performed in front of live audiences, El Conquistador vs The Invisible Man explored the "struggle against physical and metaphorical invisibility in society, and with the complexities of hyper-masculine identity in Latino culture." Shaun Leonardo's series "I Can't Breathe" began in 2015. The work came out of Leonardo's response to the death of Eric Garner and the non-indictment of the New York City Police Department officer responsible for his death. These performances are part self-defense class and part public-participatory performance. During the performance, Leonardo takes the audience through four moves: 1) How to break an arm hold; 2) how to reestablish distance if someone grabs your shirt; 3) how to block a punch; "The final maneuver is the chokehold. "The same chokehold that took Eric Garner’s life.” In Leonardo's 2008 installation and performance piece, Bull in the Ring, he and 10 semi-pro football players performed the Bull in the Ring training routine. A training routine that was banned from American football on the high school and collegiate levels. In the routine, the team forms a revolving circle around one player, the matador, would waits in the center of the ring. In its original form, the coach randomly choose players to play the part of the bull who then charge at the player in the center, possibly catching him off-guard, to deliver a blow. Leonardo had been practicing this training routing from 12 years old. Through the Bull in the Ring performance Leonardo explores the pressures young men have to face, to conform, and to prove their toughness. At the Brooklyn Museum, Leonardo staged a dance hall event that toyed with traditional gender roles, Taxi Dance inspired by popular nightclub events in the 1920s, where men would pay women to dance. Leonardo instead had participants pay men to dance with them.
