Leonard, Joanne (American, 1940-) Photograph. “Black Boy White Mask.” Photograph. Signed and dated lower right Joanne Leonard 1968. Inscription on back reads “To my darling Eliot from Helen, February 20,1976”. Leonard is represented by Joseph Bellows Gallery, California. In good condition. Image size measures 6 ” in diameter. Frame measures 12” x 12”.

From Stamps.umich.edu: Joanne Leonard has a distinguished record of achievement as an artist, scholar, and educator; she is also a leader in the University’s academic development. Recognized internationally for her pioneering work in photo-collage, feminist issues, and visual culture, she has earned the title Distinguished University Professor, one of the University of Michigan’s top honors and the first ever awarded to a faculty member in the School of Art and Design. Leonard is among the few photographers - and even fewer women artists - to be included in Janson’s History of Art and Gardner’s Art Through the Ages. Her work has also appeared in a long list of critical theory texts and feminist studies, including Lucy Lippard’s From the Center and Domna Stanton’s Discourses of Sexuality from Aristotle to AIDS. Leonard’s photographs have been widely exhibited at venues such as San Francisco’s De Young Museum, the Oakland Museum, the Pasadena (now Norton Simon) Museum, Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York, and the Whitney Downtown-Manhattan. Her work is also represented in collections of the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Detroit Institute of Art and the American Arts Documentation Centre at the University of Exeter, England, among many others. Leonard has received grants for artwork and creative research from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Michigan Council for the Arts. A recipient of the Sarah Goddard Powers Award, she spent 6 weeks in 2004 academic year as visiting artist and scholar at the American Academy in Rome.

From SFMoma.org – The View From Here: Just as photography has been instrumental in shaping California's popular image, the state — and San Francisco, in particular — has played a key role in the history of photography as an art form. Reflecting this unusually symbiotic relationship, SFMOMA was one of the first museums in the country to treat photography as an equal to painting and sculpture. In celebration of the museum's 75 years of engagement with the medium, this exhibition explores the variety and vitality of California's photographic tradition from the 1840s to the present. Drawn from the SFMOMA collection, it includes Gold Rush-era daguerreotypes and early panoramas of San Francisco, pictures by members of the influential Group f.64, street and documentary photographs, conceptual work from the 1970s, and contemporary photographs. Artists include Ansel Adams, Lewis Baltz, Dorothea Lange, Joanne Leonard, Ed Ruscha, Larry Sultan, Carleton Watkins, Carrie Mae Weems, and many others.

From Beinginpictures: Joanne Leonard is the Diane M. Kirkpatrick and Griselda Pollack Distinguished University Professor of Art and Women’s Studies and a faculty associate in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. She completed her 31st year on the Faculty at University of Michigan and her 40th year of life as a college professor in May of 2009 when she retired from teaching. Her artistic and scholarly life continues with focus on feminist photography and visual memoir. During her tenure at University of Michigan, Prof. Leonard was Director of the Program in Visual Culture at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender for three years. Her presentation Marlene and Me in Changing Focus: Family Photography & American Jewish Identy can be seen at The Scholar and Feminist Online in webjournal of Barnard’s center for Research on Women. Her photography and collage pieces are often exhibited nationally and internationally. Publication in fine arts, feminist criticism and cultural analysis include: Janson’s History of Art; Gardener’s Art Through the Ages; Pregnant Pictures: The work of Women in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; Light Writing & Life Writing, Photography in Autobiography; Time Life’s Library of Photography and Lucy Lippard’s From the Center.