Joanne Leonard is an American artist who has been making feminist art using photography and collage since the 1960s. Describing her work as an ‘intimate documentary’, she invites us to consider the universality of her personal experiences of womanhood, including pregnancy and miscarriage, divorce, and her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s.
The V&A has recently acquired a portfolio of 31 facsimile prints of Leonard’s body of work, ‘Journal of a Miscarriage’, a set of unique photo-collages she originally made in 1973. Created following the loss of her pregnancy, the series charts 53 days before, during and after her miscarriage, viscerally depicting feelings of elation, rage, deep sadness, ambivalence and more.
This interview explores the rawness of the experiences described by the work, discussing Leonard’s refusal to be silenced by the taboos surrounding women’s issues in the 1970s, and how the work is a statement of rejection of the patriarchal systems that define women’s bodily freedoms.
Joanne, we are delighted to welcome ‘Journal of a Miscarriage’ into the V&A’s collection. Photography around this subject area is under-represented in the V&A’s holdings, so we are very pleased to acquire the work. Please could you tell us how you came to collage as a practice?
At an early point in my work as a photographer, I realized I was unlikely to travel as a journalist might, and unlikely to go, for instance, to the places in the world where events described in the newspaper were occurring. My photographs had become increasingly focused on family and friends at home or near at hand. I needed to show in my work that I was aware of the wider world and all its pain and trouble – and aware, also, of art and art history. These needs led me to begin to clip images from various sources and layer them on to my photographs – thus: collage.
The collages are strikingly honest. Looking at some of them, I get the feeling that they just erupted out of you. What was the process of physically making the collages like? Did you strategically collect items, or draw on what was immediately around you? Were you creating based on day-to-day impulses, or collecting and coordinating your thoughts and feelings?
In the early days of my pregnancy, I bought a sketchbook to use as a visual journal. The first pages contained joyous collages that I made to express my delight at being pregnant, but when I had a miscarriage, I put blood on some pages. I used those blood-stained pages for some of the collages that became ‘Journal 1973’. I continued to work on the journal-in-collage – even dashing out to buy magazines and old books to cut up for my photo-collages. When I discovered a beautiful book with photographs of seashells, I saw in the images of sea creatures and their shells both vulvas and phalluses.
There are several visual puns in the work, but you similarly use language in a more subtle way. Could you say more about your relationship to language and humour (visual and/or literary) in relation to the work?
My bi-lingual father was a punster, and I have both an inherited feeling for and strong interest in languages. Pencilled notes on the pages are often just dates, but some include words and double entendres such as can be found in the word “reproduction” when paired with sexual images or thoughts of photography.
The series has been described as a ‘talisman for post-Roe times’ (referencing the US Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion laws). That phrase seems like it really captures the aim of your work, to bring the intimate realities of life into public consciousness and spaces. Could you say more about how you feel the work has evolved or changed in significance over the course of its existence, for you personally and more generally?
In the early 1970s there was the beginning of the women’s movement in the arts. For example, in 1971 American art historian, Linda Nochlin published Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? It was Nochlin’s book that helped me become aware of institutional obstacles that had long limited knowledge of women’s artwork in art’s history. Some of the same limitations existed for me but I was only coming to a juncture in my own career where I would experience these limitations.
In the case of the Journal, the women’s movement in the arts and in society at large paved a path; I made my work, Journal the very year, 1973, that the case Roe Vs. Wade came to the American Supreme Court and resulted in laws that protected women’s right to an abortion. It was in this wonderful time of progress for women and acknowledgement of women’s place and openness to women’s themes in the arts that I made my Journal. I can’t draw a straight line from all of this to my work “journal” but the atmosphere in which I made the work was one that supported women – that support was “in the air”. Also, just now, access to medical care is being severely limited by laws that restrict or criminalize women and doctors who treat women for an abortion or for the crisis of a miscarriage; I realize that in today’s atmosphere, I might easily have died of bleeding from my miscarriage.
When, in 1973, I took the work I’d just made to New York and showed it to a major curator in an important museum, the work was not of interest. It was trivialized by his patronizing and dismissive remarks. It is only just now, in the present moment – over 50 years later – that I feel the openness and interest of major art venues that have begun to embrace this work. The Whitney acquired the original Journal in 2023.
Looking back, it seems absurd that this work needed to be hidden from display spaces (in 1974 when the work was first exhibited, a special room was built to contain it, within a larger exhibition). Societal norms have certainly evolved in that we wouldn’t question our ability to plainly show the work in public spaces today, but equally, women’s reproductive rights and bodily freedoms are devolving in many parts of the world. In this way, the work seems to occupy a liminal space – it finally has its freedom to be seen and discussed widely, but some of the core themes are still ‘restricted’. Does this resonate with you at all?
Of course – there is enormous resonance for me with our present moment in America and our looming change of presidency which will have a crucial impact on the human rights for women to have proper reproductive health care. Political and cultural issues including especially abortion laws and restrictions on women’s rights to choose are prominent among the issues that concern me and reside front and centre in the national conversations in the USA at this very moment. Donald Trump’s victory ensures that abortion restrictions continue to threaten women’s lives. We need a national law that assures women of their right to full medical care without travel, delay or shame. It is important that we de-stigmatise these facts of life. Museums can help, by representing the art made to tell these stories.
