Totally Dedicated
Leonard Contino 1940–2016
Catalog of the first museum exhibition of Leonard Contino, a Brooklyn-born, self-taught abstract artist whose tenacious exploration of pictorial space spanned a fifty-year career.
Description
Totally Dedicated describes the extraordinary art practice of Leonard Contino, a Brooklyn-born, self-taught abstract artist whose tenacious exploration of pictorial space spanned a fifty-year career. In 1959 at the age of nineteen, Contino was severely injured in a diving accident. Paralyzed from the shoulders down, he retained some mobility in his arms and hands, and needed to use a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Contino went on to have a fifty-year career creating paintings and sculptures that are as technically accomplished as they are compelling. Encompassing more than eighty artworks, Totally Dedicated is the largest exhibition of Contino's work to date, featuring colorful, hard-edged geometric paintings, playful collages, delicate reliefs, and sculptures from the 1960s through the 2000s.
Anna Conlan is Curator and Exhibitions Manager at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Other recent publications include essays in Art After Stonewall, 1969–89 and Gender, Sexuality, and Museums: a Routledge Reader.