Leonard, Joanne. Joanne Leonard. Current Photographs. January 5th - February 6th, 1988.

Jeremy Stone Gallery, San Francisco, 1988. Six-page foldout brochure on stiff paper with 5 illustrations and extensive biographical information, including long list of prior exhibitions, publications, and collections. Scarce, only two copies held by libraries according to WorldCat. Fine. Summary:

Joanne Leonard: Current Photographs is a scarce, 6-page exhibition brochure and catalog published by the Jeremy Stone Gallery in San Francisco to accompany a solo exhibition of Joanne Leonard’s work that ran from January 5 to February 6, 1988. Printed on stiff paper, the publication serves as an important mid-career snapshot of the artist's evolving visual style.

Core Themes and Content

• Intimate Documentary and Beyond: The catalog highlights Leonard's continuing exploration of what she termed "intimate documentary"—the practice of turning a camera toward private, domestic spaces and personal experiences. However, by 1988, this work prominently showcased how she expanded traditional documentary photography by integrating layers of complex photo-collage.

• The "Roots and Wings" Era: The curated works and five illustrations inside the brochure trace her output from the mid-1980s. This period was heavily defined by themes of family, single motherhood, and personal history, specifically featuring motifs of her daughter Julia, alongside dreamlike juxtapositions of natural elements like wings, moons, and cicadas over interior spaces.

• The Personal and Political Collision: True to her feminist ideology, the "current photographs" featured in the 1988 exhibition illustrate Leonard's technique of manually layering magazine clipping textures and transparencies over her negatives. This created surreal, visually dense tableaus that connected domestic, female spheres with wider global, environmental, and social anxieties.

• Biographical Appendix: A major value of this specific gallery ephemeral artifact is its inclusion of extensive biographical and archival documentation, featuring an exhaustive, updated master list of Leonard's prior museum exhibitions, publications, and permanent public collections up to 1988.

Biography of Joanne Leonard

Joanne Leonard (born 1940) is a trailblazing American photographer, collage artist, and educator celebrated for her pioneering contributions to feminist art and visual memoir. Born in Los Angeles, she grew up in Hollywood in a culturally rich home of German-Jewish émigrés and earned a B.A. in Social Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962. She began taking photography seriously after moving to West Oakland in 1963, capturing the candid, everyday struggles and quiet dignity of working-class neighborhoods before pivoting to deeply personal, taboo-shattering subjects like miscarriage, single motherhood, and her mother's battle with Alzheimer's disease. Decades before digital editing, Leonard mastered a laborious manual photo-collage technique, layering disparate cultural images over her intimate negatives to bridge private female spaces with global political and technological shifts. Her landmark artwork, Romanticism Is Ultimately Fatal (1972), achieved historic status as one of the few pieces by a woman included in early editions of H.W. Janson’s foundational History of Art textbook. Beyond her widely exhibited studio practice—held in major collections like MoMA and the Whitney Museum—Leonard enjoyed a distinguished 40-year career in academia, retiring from the University of Michigan as the Diane M. Kirkpatrick and Griselda Pollock Distinguished University Professor Emerita.