Courtney M. Leonard will never forget the first time she saw a whale. She was 24 years old and working in a ceramic studio at what was called Southampton College at the time. A 60-foot, 50-ton finback whale carcass had washed up on a beach close to the Shinnecock Indian Nation’s territory on eastern Long Island.
The whale was struck by a shipping vessel.
The mammal is vital to the tribe’s history and culture. Over the next two days, members from Shinnecock went down to perform ceremonies and pray for the whale’s spirit.
Leonard, despite having just been in a car accident and on crutches herself, also went to pay her respects.
“So I had walked out to the beach to be with the whale on crutches and my mom brought a bag of clay and I just sat down and coiled a whale tail in documentation and memory of that time and moment,” she said.
Almost two decades later, Leonard has opened her first retrospective art exhibition at The Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington. It showcases her work over the years, exploring ecological issues and Indigenous culture with the whale as a common thread.
At the entrance of the exhibit sits a large pile of ceramic sperm whale teeth on a wooden shipping pallet. Leonard said she wanted to show the impact international shipping has on whales. Each year thousands of whales are struck by container ships, with over two dozen having washed up on the east coast this year.
The piece of work is called BREACH: Logbook 23 | BREACH #2, and is a part of a series she started in 2015 modeled after log books kept by whaling ships. Each installation embodies a different definition of the word “breach,” related to whales, water and material sustainability.
It references not only a whale breaching water but also a breach of boundaries or contract.
Another work in the series defines breach in terms of land loss due to erosion or imposed law, with organic contoured shapes painted on the wall and floor to show changing shorelines.
Leonard said another big influence of her work with “Breach” came from her daughter.
Leonard gave birth to her daughter on Sept. 30, a day before her tribe received federal recognition in 2010 after a decades-long battle. That same year was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
“In relationship to the work of breach, I do think a lot about being a mother and the future of our kids, and what we're leaving for them,” she said.
Leonard’s second exhibit on Long Island and her first outdoor installation is located in Planting Field Arboretum State Historic Park in Oyster Bay. In the middle of a grassy field stands a metal shipping container partially covered by a hill.
Leonard said this idea stemmed from something she read back as a teenager about root cellars. Root cellars were a natural way her tribe would refrigerate food by understanding how the land cools and freezes, but this practice was taken from them.
“We weren't allowed to keep our root cellars because the colonists brought cattle and as the cattle were roaming through the land, if they fell through our root cellar, they would break their leg and if they broke their leg, we were forced to pay back the cow,” she said. “If we didn't pay back the cow, they would say, ‘Oh, well, we'll take your land.’”
Leonard said she wanted the installation to represent a root cellar with replicated northern right whale jaws on either end. On top of the hill is a hole to look down into the shipping container, marking the place a cow would fall through.
“So the idea was that you're walking through the mouth or the belly of the whale that is also then the root cellar.” Leonard said. “And I was thinking about the viewer as cattle moving through the land and viewing and witnessing this Leviathan that's buried within the earth.”
She compounded that idea by using a shipping container to emphasize the amount of whale deaths caused by ship strikes. Leonard’s work not only shines light onto ecological harms but also the injustices to her community as a whole.
“There's a lot of racism on Long Island and when you try to talk about what's happening, and you try to get people to hear you, you're combated,” she said. “I think I often choose the relationship of animals as a metaphor for self or for Indigenous community because people often will pay attention to the impact of an animal, a whale, a deer more than they will an Indigenous person.”
Printed on a wall in the exhibit, Leonard poses the question “Can a culture sustain itself when it no longer has access to the environment that fashions that culture?”
In the face of land loss and climate change, she tries to answer that question through her art, speaking to her community’s resilience.
“Ultimately, the thing that I've learned with the work of breaching this question is that we do our best to care for the place that we live on, because it is what we have, and what we love,” she said.
Read more about Courtney M. Leonard and view her work on her website.
