Leslie Kerby is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Kerby focuses on the life of social narrative and explores how it changes when experienced on either a personal or collective perspective. Echoing the vast changes of her subject matter, the artist works in collage, drawing, painting and printmaking in order to capture how individuals use their identity as a form of cultural currency.

The Media portrays seven women standing in front of a chador-covered Statue of Liberty who protects a solitary man in despair. One of the female caricatures standing at the far right of the composition turns away while the others continue an unsettling but shared voyeurism. This tense moment of confusion resonates in Check All That Apply, a collage with litho transfer and etching that captures eight different portraits of an anonymous man. The drawn face and figure appear strikingly the same, but the skin color varies slight from the other.

Kerby’s intricate dialogue surrounding gender, culture and race culminates in the Public Housing-series where the artist identified the partially enclosed polygon as a symbol for this social need. In several pieces this form juxtaposes and opposes itself, creating a no-win visual diorama that ends up as an abstract pattern. The associations and metaphorsgenerated by the Public Housing-series are vast.

Leslie Kerby has studied at the Arts Students League, the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and the Lower Eastside Printshop. She has exhibited her work at the Object Image Gallery in Brooklyn, most recently in 2009. Since her solo show Dialogues took place in 2005, Kerby’s art has appeared at the Masur Museum of Art in Monroe, Louisiana; the Chelsea Art Museum in New York City; the Loyola College Crown Center Gallery in Chicago, Illinois; the Arkansas State University Bradford Gallery in Arkansas State, Arkansas as well as Kunsthalle Galapagos, Storefront Gallery, Norte Maar and the Kentler International Drawing Space from Brooklyn. She has been awarded artist residencies at at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, VA and School of Visual Arts, in New York, New York.