LE'ANDRA LESEUR: MONUMENT ETERNAL
October 3, 2025 - March 26, 2026, Flagship
Tulsa Artist Fellowship presented Le’Andra LeSeur: Monument Eternal, an evolving meditation on the violence of erasure, the weight of silence, and their profound effects on collective identity and mental well-being.
What began as a personal reckoning with Stone Mountain, Georgia—the site of the Ku Klux Klan’s 1915 resurgence—expanded into a broader investigation of American landscapes shaped by racial terror, where memory remains unmarked, suppressed, or distorted. Through video, sculpture, photography, and sound, LeSeur constructs an embodied archive of presence where absence has long prevailed.
At the center of the exhibition is a video work inspired by Stone Mountain, a public park marked by a three-acre carving of Confederate leaders begun in 1923 and completed in 1972. Despite its violent historical associations, the site remains a popular destination—one the artist herself frequented growing up in Atlanta. Revisiting the mountain as an adult prompted a deeper consideration of its corporeal and psychological impact, forming the basis of this series.
The video presents a poetic translation of the body in collapse, composed of slow-motion footage of the artist repeatedly falling at the mountain’s peak. Borrowing its title from Alice Coltrane’s autobiographical writings, the work parallels Coltrane’s spiritual endurance with LeSeur’s own physically demanding performance practice. Through these gestures, LeSeur confronts historical constructions of Blackness while navigating her identity as a queer Black person. Her spoken word poetry—written and narrated by the artist—forms the foundation of the film’s score.
“My work aims for a more intentional and sensitive connection to… sites of violence… At the core of this project, I introduce new forms of healing and reconciliation within the midst of trauma and violence… Monument Eternal transforms memories of violence… into transcendences.”
— Le’Andra LeSeur
The exhibition’s most recent iteration turns to the 1911 lynching of Laura Nelson and her son, LD Nelson, in Okemah, Oklahoma. Though predating the Klan’s resurgence at Stone Mountain, this history exists within the same continuum of racial violence. With no official marker at the site, LeSeur addresses how such histories are obscured or reduced to dehumanizing imagery. Through sculptural and photographic works, she resists spectacle, creating alternative memorials grounded in quietude and refusal.
Additional works emerge from the artist’s embodied responses during visits to Stone Mountain, where subtle physical movements—shifts in breath, flicks of the wrist—are translated into mark-making gestures. These forms appear across paintings, drawings, and blown glass, transforming involuntary reactions into material records. Together, the works extend LeSeur’s inquiry into how bodies carry history and how art can function as a vessel for healing.
PRESS
Artforum (March 2026)
“The idea that confronting death can lead to a more meaningful present grounds Monument Eternal… Without re-presenting violence, the results are a meditation on death that hopes to inspire the living.” — Kate Green
The Pickup (December 4, 2025)
“LeSeur approaches the mountain not as a fixed monument but as a wound… transforming Stone Mountain into a site of her own becoming and transcendence.” — Cassidy Petrazzi
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
A Necessary Space
April 26, 2026
On the occasion of the closing of Le'Andra LeSeur’s exhibition, Monument Eternal, this panel brings together Acclaimed Designer, Kamille Glenn, and NDA Haus Founder, Vondell J. Burns to join her in an intimate conversation on the importance of telling our stories through intentionally cultivated spaces.
On Death, Grief, and the Importance of the Archive
November 22–23, 2025
Le’Andra LeSeur brings together death doulas Resham Mantri and Trishia Frulla to lead a two-day program, On Death, Grief, and the Importance of the Archive, examining the enduring effects of grief. Together, they will explore how grief is embodied and carried through collective memory. They will also highlight the role of the personal archive as a vital act of care that disrupts cycles of violence and systemic erasure.
It’s About You: Silence, Erasure, and the Persistence of Memory
October 4, 2025
On the occasion of Le’Andra LeSeur: Monument Eternal, this panel features LeSeur, Joël Díaz, and Jessica Lynne, who consider how artistic practices anchored in language can reframe historical absences as sites of knowledge production and cultural continuity in the face of systemic erasure.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Le’Andra LeSeur (b. 1989 in Bronx, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work encompasses a range of media, including video, installation, photography, painting, and performance. Her body of work, a celebration of Blackness, queerness, and femininity, seeks to dismantle systems of power and achieve transcendence and liberation through perseverance. Through the insertion of her body and voice into her work, LeSeur provides her audience with an opportunity to contemplate themes such as identity, family, Black grief and joy, the experience of invisibility, and what it means to take up space as a queer Black woman—a rejection of the stereotypes which attempt to push these identities to the margins. The artist has received several notable awards, including the Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2024-2026), Leslie-Lohman Museum Artists Fellowship (2019), the Time-Based Medium Prize, and the Juried Grand Prize at Artprize 10 (2018). LeSeur has appeared in conversation with Marilyn Minter at the Brooklyn Museum, presented by the Tory Burch Foundation, and has lectured at The New School, NY, NY, and the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA, among others. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at MFA Boston, Boston, MA; Swivel Gallery, NY, NY; The Shed, New York, NY; Marlborough, New York, NY; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Assembly Room, New York, NY; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Arnika Dawkins, Atlanta, GA; and others. Residencies include Pioneer Works, iLab at The University of the Arts, Visual Studies Workshop, ArcAthens, NARS Foundation, Marble House Project, and MASS MoCA.
EXHIBITION IMAGES
The third iteration of Monument Eternal is commissioned, in part, by Tulsa Artist Fellowship. The touring works were co-commissioned by Pioneer Works and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, and are curated by Vivian Chui. This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Tulsa Artist Fellowship; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; and the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.