Shaun Leonardo on masculinity
Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York presents “The Invisible Man,” a survey exhibition of works by Shaun Leonardo. This marks the artist’s first solo show with the gallery, and will be on view from Friday, June 26th, through Saturday, August 7th. An opening reception will take place on Thursday, July 9th, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. The artist will be present.
Spanning drawing, painting, video, sculpture, and performance, “The Invisible Man” traces Leonardo’s longstanding investigations of masculinity, race, memory, and what the body can endure under pressure. The exhibition’s title draws on Ralph Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man” (1952), referencing the experience of being viewed through the lens of racial stereotypes and projection, and therefore being unseen. For Leonardo, this invisibility is both an internalized condition and a social position—one tied to the repeated failures produced by systems of oppression, constructs of masculinity, racial stereotypes, and of institutions that promise belonging while ultimately withholding it.
These subsumed failures surface early in Leonardo’s self-imaging. Works such as Self-Portrait Azua (The Fall 2) (2010) re-imagines the artist as a defeated warrior, drawing on superhero imagery, religious iconography, and the Dominican landscape of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The figure appears powerful, but fallen, monumental yet vulnerable, asking what remains of the hero when there is no one to save.
Leonardo’s exploration of collective masculinity informs The Messengers, a body of work focused on hands. Earlier paintings from this series depict the hands of figures he identifies as spiritual teachers and sources of wisdom, including Tupac Shakur, Bruce Lee, Héctor Roca, and Brian Tripp. Rendered in sign enamel and pearlescent pigment, these hands suggest work, care, creation, communication, and transmission. Within the framework of The Invisible Man, the focus on hands also speaks to partial and selective perception—how Black and brown figures are often seen in fragments rather than as fully visible or accountable selves.
Leonardo extends this idea in his expansion of the series through pencil drawings of the hands of disgraced figures charged with sexual abuse, including Bill Cosby, P. Diddy, R. Kelly, Woody Allen, and Dominique Pelicot. Attentive to the forensic reading of gesture, these works examine how power, control, innocence, and self-justification are performed through the body. The series forms an important counterpoint to the earlier works, asking how influence can become corrupted, and how the public participates in sustaining or excusing it.
Leonardo continues to build on earlier works through his expansion of We Went Undefeated (2024), a video installation exploring masculinity, memory, and gendered responsibility. The piece reflects on his experience as captain of the Queens Falcons, a multiracial football team from Queens that won a 1995 championship during a period of heightened racial tension in the United States. In We Went Undefeated 2 (2026), Leonardo shifts away from the themes of belonging and joy that defined that reigning season, turning instead toward memories of failure. Through slowed and incremental movement, four men— including Leonardo—reflect on their evolving understandings of defeat, from adolescence on the field to their current lives as fathers. Through an Ellisonian lens of invisibility, these identities—athlete, victor, and father—are never fully seen on their own terms, but filtered through limited public narratives of success and failure. In this way, football becomes both memory and metaphor, a site where manhood is learned, performed, and later re-examined.
The Return of El Conquistador (2026), a three-channel video and sound installation, revisits Leonardo’s long-running lucha libre persona. First developed through performances in which El Conquistador battled El Hombre Invisible, the work frames invisibility as both a literal opponent and a psychic condition. Revisiting the alter ego more than two decades later, the artist reflects on what it means to inhabit the very figure he once critiqued. The performance confronts obscurity, transformation, and the fine line between role and self.
Failure does not sit at the margins of “The Invisible Man;” it is the core of the exhibition. The fallen hero, the athlete, the fighter, the mentor, and the disgraced icon each reveal a different fracture in the hypermasculine myths and socially imposed standards Leonardo has spent years examining. As identity is constructed through repeated acts of performance, it is also constructed through the moments when those performances falter. Leonardo proposes failure not as an endpoint but as a condition through which visibility, vulnerability, and self-knowledge become possible.
Shaun Leonardo (b. 1979, Queens, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work negotiates societal expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding Black and brown masculinities, along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. Leonardo received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has received support from Creative Capital, Guggenheim Social Practice, Art for Justice, and A Blade of Grass.
Founded in 2010, Cristin Tierney Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with a deep commitment to the presentation, development, and support of a roster of both established and emerging artists. Our program emphasizes artists engaged with critical theory and art history, with an emphasis on conceptual, video, and performance art.
