Leslie Hewitt

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

A visual artist, Leslie Hewitt works with photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations addressing fluid notions of time. Her work oscillates between the illusionary potential of photography and the physical weight of sculpture. In her distinct photographed arrangements, she isolates personal ephemera and the residue of mass culture to consider the fragile nature of quotidian life.

During her fellowship, Hewitt will look closely at the optical origins of the camera obscura and representations of political thought and value in contemporary media. Informed by this research, she will develop a series of large-format photographic prints. Using the logic of the camera as a tool to confront and transform perspective, her new work will explore paradoxes of cultural memory and technology through the construction of temporary still-life structures that are repeatedly composed and photographed over time, capturing subtle shifts in daylight, gravity, and perception.

Hewitt studied at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the Yale University School of Art, and New York University, where she was a Clark Fellow in the Africana and visual studies programs. She was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and received a 2008 Art Matters research grant to the Netherlands. She has had or will have exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Artists Space in New York, Project Row Houses in Houston, and LA><ART in Los Angeles. Hewitt has held residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.