Assembly

Shaun Leonardo

Due to the process-based nature of the Session program, this project will undergo constant modifications; the features of this page provide accruing information on the project’s developments.

Date:
January 12–March 9, 2017

Recess Assembly
370 Schermerhorn Street
Brooklyn, NY 11217

Public Hours:
Thursday – Saturday, 12-6pm

In January 2017, Recess will launch Assembly, a nine-month pilot program in a satellite space at 370 Schermerhorn Street. To expand upon our mission to connect artists and publics, Assembly will offer arts-based diversion programs. Diversion programs present alternatives to incarceration and other adult sanctions for court-involved youth, who are treated as adults by New York State Criminal Court. Recess will partner with Brooklyn Justice Initiatives to recruit program participants at the court level to participate in arts programs organized by Recess and designed and led with teaching artist Shaun Leonardo. When participants complete the program prosecutors may close and seal their cases.

The core curriculum for Assembly’s arts programs will focus on visual artists’ methods of creative problem solving and techniques of storytelling and performance, with the goal of developing tools to challenge the dominant narratives that surround youth and the justice system. Storytelling workshops in particular will point up the problematic social structures that affect each individual and the choices they make. Throughout these programs, participants will learn directly from the artist about their decision-making process, and participants will have the chance to assert their own creative agency in exercises and conversations.

The first four weeks of the Assembly diversion program will be court mandated, and participants will be required to attend. The subsequent four weeks will be voluntary, and those who elect to continue will be paid to create a final project and curate a final exhibition combining participants’ work with the artist’s work. The paid option to continue the program will offer the possibility of deeper educational engagement and will introduce art and curatorial work as career paths. The exhibition will remain on view for three additional weeks.

For the initial cycle of the program, from January–April, 2017, Shaun Leonardo’s own body of work will occupy the street-level, public storefront gallery. Similar to Recess’s seasoned Session program in Soho, which allows artists to pursue works in progress in a public setting, Assembly will grant Leonardo the opportunity to activate and add to the space cumulatively, working toward an evolving installation rather than a static exhibition. Leonardo’s videos, drawings, and documentation of his performance art will be present in the gallery and will also be used as a jumping off point for discussion during the educational diversion programs.

At the core of Shaun Leonardo’s project—as it unfolds both in the front gallery and during program sessions—will be a seamless treatment of artistic and educative practice. To this end, the formal layout of the adjacent classroom and gallery will be porous, and an ideology of alternative pedagogy will pervade the entirety of the space. Leonardo will have custom seating and storage fabricated to redefine the priorities of critical inquiry and to provide a counterpoint to furniture typically found in learning institutions; rather than connoting uniformity and institutional homogeneity, the furnishings and arrangement of the space will welcome a variety of subject positions and learning styles. Visitors to Assembly will therefore be encouraged to adapt new positions and language to describe a justice system that rejects popular notions of criminality.

Assembly is invested in reframing the narrative around the justice system with and for court-involved participants, but in order to effect change in this pressing arena, there is a need to reframe the dominant story and language for everyone, regardless of one's proximity to the system. As such, Leonardo’s project will include a series of public workshops using the same curriculum employed during diversion programs. Artists, educators, and members of the public are invited to participate in these sessions; please email info@recessactivities.org for more information.

After his three-month gallery activation, Leonardo will remain the lead educator of the Assembly diversion program for the full duration of the nine-month pilot.

About the artist

Shaun Leonardo

Artist & past Co-Director

Shaun Leonardo has dedicated over 15 year of his professional career to arts administration at the intersection of community engagement, public programming, and experimental pedagogies. Deeply invested in processes of reciprocal exchange, Leonardo’s work flows from a belief in collaborative leadership and artistic visioning.

Leonardo served as Co-Director of Recess, helping guide the organization’s continuous evolution as an engine of social change. Shaun joined Recess in 2016, initiating the art-based diversion program Assembly as its project and curricular lead, while also acting as the project’s first facilitator. Over the course of nearly 9 years, Shaun continued to expand his role, ultimately being invited to fill the organization’s first co-directorship with founder Allison Freedman Weisberg in 2021. And during the last almost four years, Shaun took on the effort of guiding Recess through the pandemic onto thriving both programmatically and fiscally. His time was dedicated to internally operationalizing care and accountability, while pushing experimentation within the org’s external-facing programming.

He is a Brooklyn-based artist from Queens. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is a 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, MASS MoCA and The Bronx Museum, and proﬁled in the New York Times and CNN. His ﬁrst major public art commission, Between Four Freedoms, premiered at Four Freedoms Park Conservancy, in the fall of 2021.