An in-depth conversation with artist and arts leader Shaun Leonardo about how creative practice reveals the body’s innate intelligence and capacity for transformation. Leonardo’s decade of work with incarcerated individuals and trauma survivors has led him to a radical premise: certain experiences cannot be processed through language alone.
An in-depth conversation with artist and arts leader Shaun Leonardo about how creative practice reveals the body’s innate intelligence and capacity for transformation. Leonardo’s decade of work with incarcerated individuals and trauma survivors has led him to a radical premise: certain experiences cannot be processed through language alone. His methodology strips away narrative to access what he calls the "choreography of how we've learned to move in reaction to what happened to us"—the essential gestures that carry our deepest truths. We also explore the extractive nature of arts institutions and what organizational health looks like when human needs are centered.
Roddy Schrock: Shaun, thank you for being on the podcast today. It’s great to see you. And for those listening who don’t know Shaun Leonardo’s work, Shaun is a Brooklyn-based artist from Queens. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is recipient of support from Creative Capital, Guggenheim, Social Practice Art for Justice, and A Blade of Grass. His work has been featured at the Guggenheim Museum, the High Line, New Museum, and Four Freedoms Park Conservancy, and profiled in the New York Times and CNN.
Leonardo’s multidisciplinary work negotiates societal expectations of manhood — most often definitions surrounding Black and Brown masculinities — along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. His performance practice is participatory and invested in a process of embodiment. And Shaun has recently rejoined Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens as co-director, so great to see you here today, and really appreciate you being open to talking about some of the larger questions around what it means to be healthy as a creative person, professionally, emotionally, physically.
I was really looking forward to this conversation with you, because you’re one of the few people I know who have insight into both what it means to be a creative practice practitioner, as well as someone who is actively involved in the field as a leader, co-leader of an institution. And have seen what making a creative life, particularly in New York, entails from every angle, and then the focus of your work provides insights that I’m really happy to explore further with you for the next hour or so. So again, really appreciate it, and I love starting every conversation on this show with this general question, and everyone has a different answer, obviously, but what is your first memory of art? Why don’t we start there?
Shaun Leonardo: I love this question, Roddy, and also I just have to say on the record that I think you have the perfect voice for a podcast.
Roddy: Thank you.
Shaun: I hope to match your tone and cadence in some successful way.
Roddy: One of these days, I’ll figure out what I want to do when I grow up, so maybe this is a part of it, right?
Shaun: So I’m going to take a sideways approach to your question here, because in asking my earliest — what comes up for me most is actually the lack of arts that I grew up with. Both my parents are immigrants to this country. My father is from Guatemala. My mother’s from Dominican Republic, and growing up in Queens, the most diverse nexus of the universe, and while I was around an incredible amount of culture, art with a capital A was not something that I was exposed to until much later on in life.
I do have early recollections of attending the Queens Museum, but specifically for the panorama exhibit as a small child, likely during elementary school visits. So the earliest memory I have of experiencing art is likely my visits during high school to the Met. I was shipped out from Queens every day to attend an all-boys Jesuit high school, very prestigious school in the Upper East Side, and so therefore, daily, was subject to an incredible culture shock, and for the first time, having grown up in Queens, experienced what it meant to be othered and to feel different.
Ironically, that did not transfer onto my experience of viewing the Renaissance works located at the Met, and I found those glorified works of art stunning and incredibly beautiful, but in no ways — surprisingly, I didn’t find them alienating. Actually saw myself in those masterful works. However, I bring that up in connection to a much later experience of art, likely during my college years, when the first time I encountered a Kerry James Marshall painting, and I think this provides the proper segue into the context of this conversation.
Sitting in front of one of his larger scale works — and of course, unfortunately, I’m going to forget the name — and seeing how he rendered the deepness of that Black flesh and the coloration and variation that he was able to place within paint to express the figure. I was so deeply moved that I started crying in front of a painting for the first time.
Roddy: I love that story. And just for a bit of context for people who don’t know, the panorama at the Queens Museum is essentially a replica from maybe the early 80s of essentially the New York City skyline — major architectural buildings that are located throughout the boroughs, but it’s at a scale that you actually walk around. Going back to the experience where you had that reaction to the art, could you talk a little bit about — I mean, crying is a physical reaction, like, it’s an emotional and it’s a very physical reaction. Could you talk a little bit about what it was that you experienced when you saw that, what was the feeling that you had at that moment?
Shaun: It sounds almost cliché to use the terminology at this point in 2025, but it was the process of feeling seen. And my experience of art, though late in my life, became quite dominant in terms of how I started to navigate the world and even started to identify as an artist myself at a very young age — since high school, really. But my experience of work was primarily through the viewing of white figures, right? White figuration. And as I said, I didn’t separate myself in the experience of those works, but I also just didn’t know. I just didn’t know it was possible to capture the beauty and breadth of dark flesh and humanity in paint and in painting.
And in doing so, two things happened. For the first time, I was realizing that my own self and people that look like me could be the subject of a painting without compromise. And secondly, what opened up for me as a practitioner is the knowledge that I could attempt to also capture individuals, community members, family members, that looked like me and shared in my experience of the world.
Roddy: So if I’m hearing you, it sounds like that experience was as much a point of self-realization in almost like a meta kind of understanding of who you are and sort of where you fit into the world, or could fit into the world, but also triggered your artistic career. Is that right?
Shaun: Yeah.
Roddy: And I mean, this is a question I’m really trying to get to. So given that background, given that you moved into art as an artist, following some of those experiences, how do you define health as an artist?
Shaun: Well, it’s evolved over time, and for a moment, I will just attempt to create an association between my experience at the Kerry James Marshall painting and this question. I’m still a full believer in the impact the experience of art can have on one’s not only perception of self and therefore sense of self, but quite literally, the impact it might have on the sensations one is having in the moment, right? And I think that’s often overstated or overlooked, or maybe it’s taken for granted.
But the way I often describe it, is that this space in between yourself as the viewer and the painting becomes so magnetized, so charged, that your experience of your own body and psyche in the moment is shifting, yeah, and you’re being brought into another space — a perceptual space that is — and the way that that has an immediate impact on your nervous system is felt and incredibly important in relation to how we think about art’s place in the world, right?
So it’s not only the way that it recharges our imagination, the way that it might complicate and or give nuance to how we see certain subject matter and or our experience of the world. What I’m meaning is that that space in between yourself and this work of art is also changing you in a physiognomic sense, right? And that is often what I try to locate in my own practice, the possibility of that exchange with the viewer, whether it’s through painting, drawing or my performance practice, right?
Roddy: Well, that’s one of the reasons I wanted to jump right to that question is because I was hoping that you would start speaking to some of those almost like somatic elements of art, and that’s something that I wish I heard more people talk about, because I do think there — I have experienced that. And I think probably anyone who cares about art has experienced some version of what you’re describing based on the situation and that’s approaching art as someone who’s engaging it from the outside.
What are some things that you do as an artist to create those moments for someone, to find that experience that you’re talking about, almost that the nervous system itself becoming charged or shifted or changed? And I would love to just hear more about how you approach that as a creative person.
Shaun: Particularly as it is embedded in my performance practice, I usually use the terminology of physical embodiment and or the philosophies of somatic practice to talk about the aims of my work, and that is especially in the work that has been invested in the criminal legal system, and therefore has moved into areas in which we are examining experiences of trauma.
What I’m looking to both validate and shift are the ways in which those experiences, particularly those charged experiences, are housed within our bodies, right? And so, just to move back into the terminology for a moment, in the philosophy of the soma — of the somatic — what we are increasingly coming to understand is the parameters around the fight, flight, freeze, and now a newer term that has joined those three: fawn reactions to an external charge or sensory experience, and that the way we react to those events or moments is literally — when I say housed in our body — it is flowing through our nervous system, and much of the ways that it’s doing so becomes unconscious to us in an intelligible way.
And therefore the notion is that to really attend to the nervous system, one cannot rationalize what the event is or how it occurred to a person. Instead, it needs to be located and attended to in the body. And so therefore, in the nature of my work, which is as I’ve described, invested in this experience of physical embodiment, quite literally, what I do is strip down an entire story that we are telling ourselves or experience as we might articulate it, and instead dial it down and distill it down into a minimal, frozen gesture, a simple pose that might articulate the emotional core of that story.
And it’s in that stripped down gesture that quite often what we see is a more pure sense and sensation of what that experience felt like. The argument being that there are certain types of experiences, particularly those that are loaded and clouded with trauma, that can’t possibly be articulated through verbal language, and so therefore, explaining the circumstances or flowing through verbal narrative as a way to try to understand that experience does not suffice, right?
Instead, we really have to see and analyze the impact that experience has had on one’s body, and what I often say is like the choreography of that body, the way that we’ve learned to move and or shrink ourselves and or make ourselves big and or, our movements that are meant to navigate the world in reaction to that thing that just happened to us, yeah, and that is housed in our body in such a way that, quite literally, how we hold ourselves, how we might look at another individual, the ways in which we might shake another person’s hand are all affected because we’ve modified and morphed ourselves into a version that must protect ourselves from the possibility of that future experience occurring again, right?
And so the clinical studies are now showing that in order to reset both the nervous system and even start to recreate pathways in the brain, that one must not only attend to their experience of those stories and sensations within the body, but also must do so in a caring environment, and that loving relationships will begin to reset and repattern how we hold ourselves and move in the world.
Roddy: I love what you’re saying, and it raises so many thoughts in so many areas that I would love to dig into more. But I think just as a kind of container of what you’re saying, there’s such a beauty to recognizing that humans are completely capable of change and of growth, and that the way that we approach the world does not have to be set in permanence, and that there are ways to repair and to heal and to come to a better relationship with the world and make our way in the world, in a way that is better for ourselves as well as those that we encounter in the world.
And listening to you, I’m thinking to myself, I mean, do you think of your art practice as a healing practice?
Shaun: It’s interesting. I tend to steer away from the frame, though, because I’m very understanding and therefore quick to define what my practice is not, and those that have participated in my work have described it as therapeutic, but I think it’s important to delineate what is therapeutic versus what is therapy.
And in my practice, I really — the objective in the work, particularly in the collective work that utilizes this methodology, is to create a collective experience in which each individual feels less alone. And while that is therapeutic, in the scope of my work, I’m not attempting to divulge and or therefore reconfigure, on an individual level, how one might hold on to and then change themselves.
Though, again, I’m providing sort of contradictory notes here, Roddy. I have seen change in people and in collectives as they continue to work on themselves and with one another as inspired by this work. My feeling around defining anything as healing and or a healing practice is that there are a number of ways to sort of understand healing in one’s work. I mean, there’s healing that takes place when you have a meal with your family. I think there’s healing that takes place when you set aside time to simply just look at nature and do nothing else. When you turn your phone off, there’s healing that takes place.
Healing for me is always present tense and never complete, right? And so as it pertains to my work, I’d like to believe, and therefore work to create a moment in which there’s a crack in an individual, in how they see possibility for themselves, and that struggle that one might go through in pursuing that space and that openness — that I do believe is healing.
Roddy: Right. That makes so much sense, and I appreciate the distinction that you’re drawing there, and I completely get it. And I’m just thinking also as a practitioner, as someone who has navigated art practice on both coasts and has seen a lot of different approaches to maintaining one’s life as an artist, how do you find healing for yourself in your practice? And what are ways in which you’ve been able to maintain a place where you can actually create art like this? Because it’s, I’m sure it asks a lot of you.
Shaun: I really appreciate the question, and I’ve never been able to come up with a full answer, even for myself. I’m often asked this question because of the communities in which my work has entered, and just to be clear, for the invisible audience, yes, much of my work over the last nine years has been embedded in carceral systems, specifically the court system, but I’ve also worked with different levels and spaces of trauma, both those that have experienced trauma and that have enacted trauma, so military officers, police officers, those who have been in gangs. I’ve also worked with undocumented individuals, folks that are struggling economically, folks that have had incarcerated parents and or siblings that have been impacted by imprisonment — so various ways in which folks are oppressed and oppressing.
Now the question, therefore, that is often related to this — the other question, beneath your question of how it is that I’m able to create healing for myself or the space to do this work — is this belief or notion that the work always takes and that because I’m around such a high level of emotionality and the depth of very difficult experiences that I might be depleted, and that the work is often impacting my own nervous system in negative ways. That is all true.
However, what’s equally true is that every community member and every participant that I’ve been able to have an exchange with, has been so giving and generous with me as well, right? So there’s also in the work a replenishment, right? There’s also in the work the possibility of feeling light and feeling new and feeling inspired. And that is the duality of this work.
And going back to your question of healing, I feel that to heal, one must go through an experience, as opposed to rush it aside, and that — you know, that is a controversial thing to say in this cultural context, and especially in the art world, because we’ve learned, particularly since the pandemic, to try to — or been conditioned to try to — assuage one another and run away from difficult experiences. And I think collectively, we’re losing something when art only placates, when art is set aside, or, I should say, is crafted to be a platform solely for enjoyment.
And so just to backtrack and retrace my own little monolog, what I do is I give these moments of the work space before, during and after. I try to give it the necessary room, both internally and externally. And by that, I quite literally mean it requires time to metabolize. It requires space to understand what is occurring in and around me, and it requires pause.
The moments in both my artist and arts worker career, when I have felt most depleted, most empty, is when I continued to work on someone else’s determination of rhythm and ambition and scale, for that matter. When I did not pay attention to my own necessary rhythms and my own ways of — and my own flow — when I disregarded those needs is when I had felt worse in my artistic career, right?
Roddy: When you speak of ensuring in your work that there’s space to metabolize, that there’s space for a pause, that there’s space to understand what is happening around you, I can’t help but think about that in the context of some of the things that you’re saying about what we call the art world, and one of the things that I have found challenging was in a leadership position in an arts organization, the opportunities to achieve anything close to those three elements that you just described, were sometimes lacking.
But I’m thinking about that from a slightly different aspect. I mean — I also hear you say that we also need to look at the bad feelings that we might have inside as well, and to process those and to give ourselves the time and space and opportunity to metabolize. Where do you think people in creative practice, in the art world, as art workers, as artists, where do you see opportunity, or where do you see positive movement for the field to be able to allow for a kind of healing, for lack of a better word. And I don’t mean to put it in such grandiose phrases, but I wonder where you see momentum or opportunity for the field to take care of itself better.
Shaun: Oh, I love that you’ve directed this into a positive sense. But I will say that I think we’ve lost a lot of the information that we gained during the pause that was forced upon us during the pandemic.
Roddy: Can you say more?
Shaun: I think I can only speak from my own experience and experience of my relationships with other artists and in the art world during that time. But I think it was specifically during that period of time in which we were forced to pause and therefore examine what we were committed to in our life cycles and in our rhythms, our day-to-day rhythms, that we understood how much of a rat race we were all on, right? And not for the benefit of really anyone or anything, right?
Just to name it explicitly, we continue to lie to ourselves that arts institutions don’t perform a capitalist endeavor, right? And because arts institutions have, at the end of the day, the ultimate agenda of making money, they are, by nature, extractive. And so to conduct oneself against extraction, the extraction of a capitalist engine, is really the alternative. It’s really the exception, yeah.
The pandemic gave us the pause to see that. And for many of us, we understood how unconsciously we were subjecting ourselves to these patterns that only took — only took away, right — that were not reciprocal in their exchange. And so where I see possibility are still in those smaller grassroots organizations that are experimenting with different ways of being.
So it’s — I can’t put a finer point to this. It’s not solely different ways of conducting work. It’s different ways of existing with one another, within spaces otherwise known as organizations for which a collective of individuals have decided to work on a like-minded mission. That’s all ultimately any organization of any scale is. As it grows, it becomes more mechanical, more structured, in a way that humanity is erased. But at any level, an organization is simply a group of individuals that have decided to work on a thing that they all believe in. We call that mission, and we forget always in this work that the mission is driven by human beings.
Roddy: What I’m hearing you say is, there’s a what, and there’s a how, and we really have to look at the how, the how we conduct ourselves, the how we interact and — I think there’s so much truth to what you’re saying. And my mind is reeling with thoughts, having recently stepped out of a position directly in an institution — so that’s institutional health, which is also arts worker and artist health. In so many ways. It’s all combined. It’s all interactive. All of us are constantly engaging and learning and influencing each other in this whole ecosystem.
And I mean, are there specific things? Well, let me back up a little bit. One thing that I’ve — one thing that I’ve noticed over the years is that I have worked with so many artists, to just be very specific about it, have had very significant health problems, and often in sort of unexpected or unforeseen ways, they would really come to the fore, and sometimes major, sometimes minor. But I’ve come to believe that there is something about this world that we are functioning in and to exactly what you’re pointing at. The act of building something from imagination, putting it into a hyper-capitalist system, working with organizations that claim to not be working in a capitalist manner, but in many ways, are replicating the worst of capitalism there.
I feel that there are unique kinds of stress, anxiety, pressure, self-valuation, extraordinary emotional and mental gymnastics that have to be conducted. And I think it can be very damaging, to just be very blunt about it. And are there specific things that you feel that can be done or should be done? Are there steps that could even be taken more quickly that would start to help at least address some of these challenges, to put it mildly, that I think exist in this larger system and — I agree with you that there was an opportunity to address and think about and build from some past bad habits during COVID, especially that weren’t taken.
Shaun: Yes, I have a number of different thoughts that I’d love to share, but first, I would be remiss to not mention that from my own personal experience and therefore, by extension, within my personal relationships, that those individuals that have suffered in their health because of their creative output and identities are Black and Brown people, right? Because what underlies many of those negative experiences within the institutional realm is racism, yeah.
And so with that being said, I need to answer that question, both as an artist and as an arts administrator and director.
As an artist, what has become incredibly important to the preservation of my own health and well-being as it relates to my creative output and ongoing practice, is learning how to say no — when an experience or relationship or arrangement, let’s call it, tips toward the extractive in such a way. Again, by nature, these arrangements are extractive because they’re meant to sell tickets, let’s say, but when it tips in such a way that much of the relational work becomes too laborious, I have to understand when to say no.
Alongside that, I’ve really tried to hone in on the parameters of my work as it is housed within the quote-unquote institution. So what language cannot be used to describe my work? What requirements are needed to bring in the community members that I wish to experience my work? What are the ways in which interpretive material can and cannot be introduced in translation of the work? I mean, it requires an incredible amount of study and understanding of one’s own practice, which I benefit from having been an arts worker for so long so I understand those translations. I understand those ways in which the arts institution and artists meet, and how to negotiate those things. So I’ve been fortunate in being able to wear both hats in some experiences in some settings.
But yeah, understanding the boundaries and understanding what to say no to — which so many artists, even mid-career artists that, including myself, that I know and love, we are terrified of saying no, right, particularly as artists of color, because we believe that it will all just be erased tomorrow, right? That we will be removed from the archives that — we will be forgotten within the visibility of contemporary practice, etc., etc. And that is all — that’s all what we’ve been — what’s been ingrained in us through racism, right? That the power is such that we can disappear tomorrow.
Now, from an arts administrator’s perspective, and particularly as a director, over the last five or six years, what I’ve understood, and I’m sure you shared this, Roddy, because our jobs are so dominated by fundraising, we never get to the policy and practice that might best uphold the health and well-being of the people, as I said, that are driving the machines. So I’ve really tried as best as possible to create — and I keep using, you’ll see I use the same terminology over and over — to create rhythms and structures that will force me to think about policy and practice throughout the year.
And a few different examples of policy and practice that I’ve really come to appreciate are — and I’ll try to not be too specific — but what are ways in which pause can actually be structured in the work week for employees? What are the ways in which professional development can also be framed as rest, or any type of development that recharges and re-inspires a person in their work? In our dealings and workings and negotiations with artists, what are the ways in which a budget could be configured to attend to vulnerabilities or insecurities or lacks in a person’s practice that may not be visible to them at the start? What are the ways in which their human needs and their physical, mental and emotional ability to carry out the work can actually be considered within the budget, right? Like these are the things that I try to build into this policy work and practice work.
Roddy: I mean, that is huge. And I sometimes have worried in the past that there’s been such an emphasis on professionalizing, quote-unquote, arts organizations as well as artists. And essentially, what that means is introducing almost like corporate structures into the ways that people function. And there was such an emphasis put on that in the last 30 years, 20 years, I guess that arts organizations have really struggled to find that human rhythm, and to go back to reminding ourselves that this is a creative endeavor at the end of the day, and it involves people.
And I will say, the pressure to fundraise and that drive for oftentimes survival. It has a way of — it really does have a way of creating a very narrow vision of what organizational leadership can look like. And one of the things I have always enjoyed in talking to you about is you’re always pointing to ways to get out of that, and to open up the aperture, and to think bigger, and to think anew about structures that could be put into place. And I appreciate that. It’s a real — it’s a conundrum. And like a problem has a solution, a conundrum, a predicament. Sometimes it’s hard to see the solution, far more complex.
Shaun: That’s right. And I will say that let me offer what might sound like a contradictory note here. We’ve been so acculturated or conditioned with this idea of showing up to work as one’s full self that I think from an administrative point of view, many organizations of every size, are really struggling to understand what that means, first. And secondly, how to manage expectations of our shared humanity in the workplace.
And what I will say to anyone listening is I have found as difficult as it is to allow people to spill out in the workplace and still get work done, that providing the appropriate container — and by that, I mean practices and policies that give these spaces shape — shape for how someone can share, how someone can be vulnerable, how someone can express all the vulnerabilities in life and still yet try to get the work done. That is the thing that will allow an organization to thrive. It’s when there are not these parameters. It’s when there are not these policies and practices that allow, or at the very least consider an employee as a human being, is when things get messy.
Roddy: Yeah, I hear you, and that also brings me to something else that I’ve thought about a lot — transitions of leaders of organizations and how boards manage those moments as well. This is, in my opinion, an area that the whole field would benefit from support. And by support, I mean funding, other kinds of resources and so forth. Someone in your position is doing so much to create exactly the kinds of support and containers that you’re describing. I feel like sometimes, because of the nature of how organizations are structured, boards don’t have the same learnings even, or resources or time to be able to take that to the larger framework of leadership and so forth, and that’s an area that I would really love to see addressed, and I feel like there’s potential for a lot of growth to happen there, so that there can be learning at the board level, and that the board can help create those structures for itself and for the organization as a whole, especially in times of change.
Shaun: I fully agree, and I think it’s important to note and be real with ourselves right now that as this conversation is taking place, so many of the cherished organizations that we know and love are in survival mode. That’s right. And unfortunately, when we’re in such a high level of uncertainty and strategizing for one’s — to secure one’s existence, meaning an organization’s existence — the thing that is so often forsaken and quickly forgotten are those relational practices and the policies that will uphold and build an organizational health and its people’s well-being.
And my argument is this: when shit is hitting the fan, when things feel at its depths, is precisely when you should invest most in policies and practices that see people for what they’re contributing, not the opposite. And that very much includes the board. When things are at the risk of being sacrificed, that is when the board should move even more closely to the people and work holding what remains of the organization.
Roddy: Yeah, I could not agree with you more, and I think that is — there’s learning and growth to be done in that arena. But I again appreciate knowing that you are, in many ways, setting a standard for that kind of approach from the work that you’re doing on so many levels. And now back to you as an artist, pulling out of the trenches of nonprofit life.
Could you talk a little bit about what is exciting you as an artist now? What are you working on? What are you thinking about, where is the next?
Shaun: Oh, thank you for that. Well, I’m going to answer that in two ways. I’m reaching the age of 46 and I think that is firmly middle age.
Roddy: I can confirm yes, yes, it is.
Shaun: Something that I’ve heard and noted in other artist friends of a similar or older age. And I should say that I’ve been at the benefit of most of my artist relationships, being with folks that are slightly older than I. So I have received quite a bit of mentorship and knowledge throughout the years, and I think that has, in and of itself, allowed me to secure and sustain myself in my practice, is the community of artists that have continued to pull me forward.
But to back up, there’s an interesting thing that I think happens to artists at the stages in which they start reviewing their entire career, not in relation to like a state problem or anything like that. But there are certain cyclical occurrences happening in my work, in which bodies of work that I created a decade ago, or if not earlier, are resurfacing. And in my case, much of that is to re-examine how that work fit then in the culture, in the broader culture, and how that has shifted since. And then, even more personally, what have I learned and what has changed in myself in re-embodying that work? So what I’m seeking, is how I’ve evolved in revisiting aspects of my older practice.
And that has been true in revisiting much of the early, very physical Lucha Libre work. Football, American football, has resurfaced, both as a subject, but also as a personal experience that I’m divulging in once again, and really more deeply, through a different set of questions, questioning I had that — having played football for over 10 years of my life, starting at the age of 11.
And then outside of that, really thinking about how holistically the practice must evolve, but in doing so, really not steering away from the most difficult things. And so, for example, this methodology of physical embodiment and somatic practice that I was describing earlier, I have an opportunity in less than a month, to go to Istanbul for an exhibition in which I’ve asked to specifically work with male-identified bodies that believe they hold power and or authority to examine their experiences of anger.
And similarly, with the football work, part of the questions that I’m asking are, how is it that with so much knowledge around the suffering of such a sport that there seems to be not only a higher popularity of the sport, but a reinvigoration of men’s participation in the gladiatorial arena? Like, what is that? And there’s a sort of cultural perspective, a sociopolitical perspective. There are so many ways in which examining what men experience, what they fear, what they’re attempting to hide, is particularly poignant in 2025. And I think for that reason, a lot of this older work that’s coming back to me, right? But I think what’s important for me is that in doing so, in asking these questions and re-examining my own practice, that it allows me to go deeper and ask harder questions, right?
Roddy: Isn’t that cool to be old enough to think of your work in decades? I think that’s kind of awesome, actually, what a treat to be able to go back.
Shaun: Well, I often — gosh, who was I listening to earlier today? And that’s — it’s not to sort of move to a more negative perspective or connotations, but often what I find is surprisingly helpful, both in my artistic practice and organizational practice, is this review of, let’s say, the decades, but through the lens of how I failed.
And much of the substance of my work has been about failure, as particularly in my early career — you read my bio, it’s all about the experiences of failure. It’s how we chase these ideals, of these constructs, in my case, specifically surrounding manhood, and where we both personally, on a community basis and on a societal basis, fall short. And so it’s not alien to my practice to hold failure as a subject of my work.
But what I mean is in this revision or review of how my work fits in today’s context, and therefore how I have changed in the work, I think it is important to see and feel for myself. It’s like, well, where did my work not work? Not to carry the burden of societal change of my practice. But it allows me to learn something from my own work, to see like, well, is there a way this, the intentionality can be communicated more differently? Is there a way that I can go deeper on a community level? Is there a way in which change can be configured within the work in such a way that it has more sustainability? I think these are good questions, even if it leads to a more depressive emotional state.
Roddy: I love it. I love it. I actually think that’s a very appropriate and actually positive note to leave things on. Because I think at the end of the day, what you’re describing is a very positive activity. You’re saying, like, let’s look at this. And growth is always a positive activity, even when it’s not easy and so — well again, thank you. It’s always a pleasure to hang out with you, to chat, just to learn about what you’re seeing in the world and — it’s such an interesting moment in the evolution of arts organizations and the artistic trajectory in general. It feels like a great opportunity to catch up and check in and — now that I’m a little bit outside the ring, it’s also satisfying to learn what’s on everyone’s mind? What are they talking about these days? The things we’re throwing in the ring metaphor, it seems like a fit.
Shaun: Thank you for the conversation. I really appreciate that.
Roddy: Absolutely, absolutely and good to see you. Bye.
++Podcast was transcribed using AI, there may be errors++