Leslie Kerby, Brooklyn, NY based artist with Red, White & Blue, and Draw Your Own Conclusions, both 2012, Mixed media collage with paper, 26 x 20 inches each in “Deadlocked and Loaded”. So again, yet another senseless mass shooting/murders by yet another young male. According to the Denver Post, the shooters sister-in-law said she saw him play about two days prior with a gun that she described as looking like a machine gun. Who the hell plays with a machine gun?!! Why are these even available? They have one purpose and one purpose only—to kill people. So as with Kerby’s powerful works, I’m drawing my own conclusions and I say ENOUGH to this senseless violence with another chalk outline on the ground. I’m sure there will be another shooting before these are even washed away.
Kerby says, “These works were originally created for a series entitled Borderlines, considering the ways in which we draw border—real or imagined—to bring people in or keep people out of society. Draw Your Own Conclusions was a Black Lives Matter statement when I created it in 2012, years before the 2020 protests—we were already talking and talking and talking about the fact that too many women/mothers/families particularly in the Black community, were losing their loved ones to gun violence. It was as senseless then as it is now—living life with an ever present chalk mark on the ground.”
Leslie Kerby is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. She works in a variety of media (printmaking, drawing, painting and video) to create thematically interlinked bodies of work. She focuses on issues related to how we lead our lives personally, as individuals. And, to how our personal lives are variably connected to, and changed by, the broader networks and communities within which we live and interact.
Her work is in the permanent collections at Columbia University, New York and Arkansas State University, Arkansas. Kerby has received commissions from Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts, BRIC Arts | Media in Brooklyn and Visual Arts Center of New Jersey. She has been awarded residencies at The American Academy in Rome, Italy, Virginia Center for Creative Arts as a Fellow in Virginia and Auvillar, France and the School of Visual Arts, New York.
Her work has also appeared at art fairs, Verge, Spring Break and AQUA Miami. She has been reviewed in hyperallergic.com and Two Coats of Paint. In addition to making and exhibiting her work, Kerby also acts as a guest curator with a number of New York art venues and institutions such as Project: ARTspace. She is a member of the Creative Council at BRIC Arts | Media, and a member of the Executive Board at Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts.
Learn more at lesliekerby.com and @lesliekerby
