Leonard Galmon is an artist whose paintings engage with blackness and belonging. Leonard gains inspiration from his own subjective impressions of society, specifically the disconnect between peoples and the callous assumptions we make about one another. His figurative work aims to both complicate perceptions of Black people and highlight the barriers between all people, in some hope of one day overcoming them. Lately, Leonard has been experimenting with elements of fantasy and magic, thinking that perhaps the way to a new reality is to first imagine one.
Leonard was born on May 29, 1996 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was a 2014 Ron Brown Scholar. He graduated from Yale University in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in art, where he won the Jonathon Edwards Art Prize for Creation. More recently, Leonard had his second solo exhibition at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, titled “For the Sake of Order.” This work used a grid pattern, overlaid with portraits, to express the microaggressions he had experienced in college and the sense of feeling “out of place” that these aggressions had instigated.
