The Da Vinci
Questionnaire
Leigh Salgado
A Feminist For Our Time
By Victoria Looseleaf
In her three-decade career, San Diego-born Leigh Salgado, whose labor-intensive, feminist-driven work – sometimes labeled Sculpted Drawing and includes altering monotypes with cutting, painting and the addition of eyelets or fasteners, with each drawing resembling a range of readymade objects such as bustiers, underwear, lace, corsets, netting, fabrics, metal and other articles of clothing – plumbs her own psychological depths only to discover what makes her love work and life.
What historical art figure would you like to have lunch with and why? Jay DeFeo. The Rose alone kind of validates her whole existence as an artist. She did all kinds of stuff and made a ton of work. The retrospective in New York a few years ago was amazing. I’d love to talk about her whole obsession with The Rose. She spent eight years working on that; and maybe it’s my favorite. I just like that she was obsessed with just working, because people are so focused on the career aspect. Jay was a beatnick/slash/hippie artist in a way, and I think she forewent some things that would have been good for her career because she was more focused. And her friendship with Bruce Conner – I’d like to talk to her about, because I think that was pretty interesting.