CONTACT 2,023...
Commissioned For The Permanent Public Collection of The Heckscher Museum of Art | Huntington, New York
“CONTACT 2,023…." interprets the early encounters between the Indigenous People of Long Island area and the Europeans, by creating a work which acknowledges that colonists did not arrive at empty shores. Indigenous communities were standing along these shores possibly
viewing their tall ships as they sailed along Long Islands coastlines; the women wearing dresses adorned with wampum shells sewn across in rows. In response to the notion of "contact", this work sets to reestablish a visual recognition of the continued presence of these
Indigenous communities through the physical action of "contact" as well as a recording of this physical presence in time.
As an Indigenous woman from the Shinnecock Nation of Long Island New York this connection is a representation and documentation of each year prior to and after the "discovery" of what is now called Long Island by pressing my mark, my thumbprint, over two thousand and twenty three times into the raw clay of the earth. Inspired by the purple tones of our wampum combined with the blue and white history of Dutch delftware.
Each ceramic thumbprint, glazed individually and sewn to map Long Island, New York, continues the cultural iconography of the times.
- Courtney M. Leonard | Shinnecock Nation