Al río / To the River: A Conversation
Zoe Leonard is an artist working with photography, sculpture, and site-specific installation. She lives and works in New York City and Marfa, Texas.
Tim Johnson is a poet, editor, and translator. He lives in Marfa, Texas, where he owns and operates the Marfa Book Co.
Since 2016, Leonard has been photographing a 1,200-mile stretch of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo that once demarcated the international boundary between Mexico and the United States. For five years, she followed the river from the border cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico, photographing both mountain and desert landscapes and human built environments like cities, towns, ranches, factories, dams, irrigation systems, fences, bridges, roads, border checkpoints, and detention centers. While anchored to the geographic, social, economic and political realities of this borderlands region, Leonard’s visual meditation on the river resonates with broader conversations about the impact of human industry and commerce on the natural world and with the urgent subjects of borders and migration globally. The resulting photographic project Al río / To the River has been exhibited internationally and is documented in a two-volume publication (Hatje Cantz; MUDAM Luxembourg, 2021) featuring Leonard’s photographs and written contributions from a diverse group of fellow artists, journalists, poets, and scholars. Johnson, who edited the texts and accompanied Leonard during much of the process, will join her for the event.