AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

In 2021, the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired Joanne Leonard’s, Journal of a Miscarriage (1973), a series of collages documenting the artist’s personal experience of pregnancy loss. Joanne Leonard is an American artist and scholar who uses photography and collage to explore feminist issues and visual culture through what she describes as “intimate documentary.” She taught at the University of Michigan for 31 years and is among the few photographers - and even fewer women artists - to have been included in Janson’s History of Art and Gardner’s Art Through the Ages.

Journal of a Miscarriage, one of Leonard’s early photocollage works, was created in 1973, as the Roe v. Wade case and women’s reproductive healthcare were dominating public discourse. According to the artist, the Journal is “not just the story of the miscarriage, but the feelings afterwards of sexuality and anger, desire, and a desire for pregnancy."

When the series of 29 collages entered the collection, two works--Death, 1973 and Condom with Stamps, 1973--incorporated 1970’s latex condoms which had deteriorated significantly. Death, 1973, was deemed unexhibitable as the embrittled condom was fragmented and darkened to a blood red-brown and had discolored the adjacent collage materials. Condom with Stamps, 1973 is no longer extant and was included by the artist with an inkjet print surrogate; the original had likely been discarded because of the deteriorated state of the condom.  The inkjet print differed in size and materiality from the other 28 works in the series, presenting more of a facsimile of the work than exhibition copy.

The presentation will outline the collaborative decision-making process around these two collages by paper conservator Clara Rojas-Sebesta and objects conservator Margo Delidow, in close discussion with the artist, who provided original collage materials from her archives in addition to contextual guidance.  The treatment of the original and the replica fabrication led to an exploration of 21st century condom technologies, an intimate encounter with lubricants and a confrontation with the inherent vice of degraded latex, which dovetailed with Delidow’s research on Lynda Benglis’ latex with the Detroit Institute of Art, presented at the 2024 AIC annual meeting.

Leonard sourced much of her photographic collage materials from the seminal 1965 book, A Child Is Born, by Swedish photojournalist Lennart Nilsson, one of the first to include photographs of a fetus in utero, as well as The Boy’s King Arthur, (1917) illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. The presentation will also touch upon the meaning in these materials and the exhibition history of this work as it reflects attitudes towards miscarriage and women’s reproductive healthcare. Through the refabrication of these collages and documentation of artist’s intent, the project results in a recovery of meaning in Joanne Leonard’s poignant Journal of a Miscarriage.