Photoville

Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation

Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation

The Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation helps fund important endeavors promoting photographic education and documentary photography across the United States. Its goal is to raise awareness of and appreciation for the field of photography as well as the photographers themselves. The Foundation has helped to fund projects and programs at dozens of nonprofit institutions over the years and takes pride in its hands-on approach and the relationships it has fostered.

https://www.leonianfoundation.org/

Archive Exhibitions Supported by Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation

A gunshot—then “a miracle”

Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza
 archive : 2025

Skye McBride, age 3, accidentally shot herself in the head with her father’s revolver—and survived. This is the story of her recovery.

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Bodega Boys

Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza
 archive : 2025

As most New Yorkers have a long, loving, and even passionate relationship with what they call “their” local bodega, Mahka Eslami’s Bodega Boys series intimately portrays the many members of the Yemeni-American community in Brooklyn who operate these colorful cornerstones of the New York experience.

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The New Black West: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo

Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza
 archive : 2025

As long as there have been cowboys, there have been Black cowboys. The New Black West celebrates the modern Black cowboys of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo and the community that comes together to witness their achievements year after year.

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FLY BALL: Vintage Snapshots of Black Athletes by Twin-Brother Photographers, Morgan & Marvin Smith

St. Nicholas Park – 132nd Street and 139th Street Jackie Robinson Park
 archive : 2024

Of the thousands of photographs and prints by Morgan and Marvin Smith in the Schomburg Center’s collections, this exhibition highlights a brief survey of sports snapshots from the 1930s–1950s. From American Negro League baseball team players sliding into home plate to collegiate star-athlete footballers dodging tackles across the field, these photographs document a pivotal era in American sports history.

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Migrantes

Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza
 archive : 2024

Following the journey of migrant workers from their homeland in Michoacán, Mexico, across the US-Mexico border, and throughout America, in search of work and a better life for their families.

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In This Brief Life

Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza
 archive : 2024

Eugene Richards draws from his latest book, In This Brief Life (2023), a collection of more than 50 years of mostly unseen photographs.

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This Land Is Your Land

Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza
 archive : 2023

This Land is Your Land is an assemblage of appropriated materials, photography, and artifacts that ask the viewer to consider their own associations with the National Parks. Viewers are asked to acknowledge land and race as it applies to the nostalgia, colonization and learned truths.

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The New New Yorkers

Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza
 archive : 2023

The journey of Yenis Andrade, a young migrant woman from Venezuela, the birth of her new baby girl, and their first steps of her and her family rebuilding their lives with New York as their new home.

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Another Perspective

Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza
 archive : 2023

Another Perspective is a cross generational photo collaboration between three documentary photographers who all have direct experince with the criminal justice system.

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Project 562: Changing The Way We See Native America

Times Square
 archive : 2022

Presented by Photoville and Time Square Arts, with additional support from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation

Created by Matika Wilbur, Project 562 is a multi-year national photography project dedicated to photographing over 562 federally-recognized tribes in what is currently called the United States, resulting in an unprecedented repository of imagery and oral histories which accurately portrays contemporary Native Americans.

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Puddles in my Head : (Our Emotions)

Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza
 archive : 2022

Presented by Photoville, with additional support from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation

Puddles in my Head is about community, love, family, friends, pain, confusion, anger, joy, struggle, redemption, and how it all intertwines within the disabled community. It’s about our emotions.

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W. Eugene Smith Grant For Humanistic Photography, 2021 Finalists

Brooklyn Bridge Park – Pier 6
 archive : 2021
The W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund is pleased to present a selection of work from the 10 2021 finalists in the 42nd annual W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography.
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The Four Elements

Brooklyn Bridge Park – Empire Fulton Ferry Lawn
 archive : 2021

The Four Elements from the Visual Thinking Collective showcases four bodies of work—the elements visually interpreted by: Nadia Aly (Water), selected by Lauren Steel; Oded Balilty (Earth), selected by Sarah Leen; realities:united (Air), selected by Shannon Simon; and Marcus Yam (Fire), selected by Elizabeth Krist.

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Taxi Journey Through My Windows 1977-1987

First Street Green Cultural Park
 archive : 2021

TAXI: Journey Through My Windows 1977–1987 is a portrait of the gritty chaos and community of New York in the 1970s. The book is composed of photographs captured from the driver’s seat of documentary photographer (and cab driver) Joseph Rodriguez’s taxi—including scenes of night workers getting off their shifts, children jumping through the spray of open fire hydrants in the summer, and S&M partiers leaving clubs, zipped in leather, in the early hours of the morning.

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Rebel Vision

Brooklyn Bridge Park – New Dock Street
 archive : 2021
Rebel Vision centers the work of Black female and non-binary photojournalists to chart the liberatory possibilities of using the documentary camera as a tool for anti-racism.
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Mystery Of The Disguised

Brooklyn Bridge Park – The Beach
 archive : 2021

Mystery Of the Disguised is a visual exploration of the construction of an imaginary with the oral story of a town in Veracruz called Coyolillo, an Afro-Mexican community in the south of Mexico—reframing their history to one of freedom.

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Paradise Lost & Found: Bushwick

IS 291 Schoolyard
 archive : 2021

Paradise Lost & Found: Bushwick is a snapshot of this section of Brooklyn during the tumultuous 1980s and early 1990s. Carrying a point-and-shoot camera to her job as an art teacher at IS 291 – Roland Hayes, Meryl Meisler’s images—kept secret for decades—are a personal memoir. Upon her retirement from teaching, she began releasing them into the world.

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