Meet Our Inaugural Artist-in-Residence: Neil Leonard

THE BLANC is pleased to inaugurate its Artist-in-Residence program with composer, saxophonist, and interdisciplinary artist Neil Leonard. The residency program is currently curated and selected by THE BLANC’s curatorial team, with plans to transition to an open call format in 2027.

“As we developed our residency program, we wanted to create a space where artistic research, production and performance could converge,” said Linda Liang, Director of THE BLANC. “Neil Leonard’s research for this site-specific work — linking his family’s role in Mayor LaGuardia’s  historic 1935 War on Noise campaign to the very neighborhood where THE BLANC is located—perfectly captures the spirit of research, experimentation, and dialogue that we hope to foster here.”

Leonard’s residency will culminate in his first solo exhibition in Midtown Manhattan, Midtown Sound: Listening Legacy, presented at THE BLANC and curated by Luca Coclite and Laura Perrone of the Italian cultural research platform and residency studioconcreto.

Leonard’s residency project explores cross-generational listening, tracing changes in the urban soundscape, the rise of mechanized sound, and debates around music, noise, and jazz across three generations of his family. Central to the research is the work of his grandfather, Paul J. Washburn, a musician, architectural consultant, and early New York–based acoustician who advised Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s 1935 “War on Noise” campaign. Working from an office diagonally across from the present site of THE BLANC, Washburn conducted early scientific measurements of urban noise throughout the city and helped produce New York’s earliest sonic maps, bringing public attention to noise as a measurable civic condition with social and public-health consequences.

Neil Leonard, Midtown 1935 (2026)

At THE BLANC, Leonard presents a series of site-specific sound installations that reconstruct and reimagine this historical moment. The works combine multichannel sound, video, sculptural elements, archival materials, and the sound of Leonard’s own saxophone, alongside period objects that evoke the sonic environment of the 1930s, when amplified music, radio broadcasts, and the growing intensity of street sound provoked public debate about technology, morality, and urban life.

The exhibition coincides with the centennial of the first civic noise measurements in New York, offering a contemporary reflection on how listening shapes our understanding of the city. A new installation created for THE BLANC extends Leonard’s earlier collaboration with studioconcreto in Italy, building on themes from his 2023 work Casino dei Angeli. That project drew on a Chinese folk melody that circulated in Europe through late 19th-century music boxes and was later incorporated into Puccini’s opera Turandot. It was originally staged within a ruined architectural site in southern Italy. Presented now in Midtown Manhattan, the exhibition brings Leonard’s work full circle—returning his family’s legacy of sonic measurement and listening research to the very urban context in which it first emerged.

As the inaugural residency exhibition, Midtown Sound: Listening Legacy introduces THE BLANC as a platform for artists whose work investigates the relationship between personal archives, urban histories, and the sensory experience of contemporary life.

Neil Leonard, Casino dei Angeli, Lecce, Italy (2023)

Neil Leonard will be in residence at THE BLANC from March 12 through May 12, 2026, occupying one of the ten newly renovated studios on the sixth floor.

As part of the residency, Leonard will also present a concert on May 1, 2026, marking the centennial of the premiere of Puccini’s Turandot, in THE BLANC’s 12th-floor performance space.

Midtown Sound: Listening Legacy will be on view April 2 – May 2, 2026 in THE BLANC’s ground-floor gallery.

About the Artist

Neil Leonard is a composer, saxophonist, and transdisciplinary artist. The healing power of collaboration, collective listening, and cross-cultural dialogue is central to his work. He maintains active collaborations in Brazil, Burundi, Canada, Cuba, China, Italy, Japan, Korea, Tanzania, the UK, and across the United States.

In 2025, Tate Modern featured his multimedia installation Matanzas Sound Map in the East Tank as one of the museum’s collection highlights commemorating its twenty-fifth anniversary. Leonard’s multimedia works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Peabody Essex Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia. His sound installation Sonance for the Precession was presented at the Williams College Museum of Art, the Usdan Gallery, and the Tang Teaching Museum. Large-scale installations and performances with Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Fujiko Nakaya, Phill Niblock, and Tony Oursler have been presented at documenta, the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial, the Getty Museum, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, The Kitchen, and the Brooklyn Museum.

New York–based exhibitions and performances include compositions premiered at Carnegie Hall (Weill Hall) by Don Byron; a long-term collaboration with composer Phill Niblock; performances at the Queens Museum; participation in Live at the Guggenheim, curated by Carrie Mae Weems, at the Guggenheim Museum; and concerts at Issue Project Room, Roulette, Experimental Intermedia, and the Knitting Factory.

Musical collaborators include Robert Black, Joanne Brackeen, Terence Blanchard, Juan Blanco, Alvin Curran, Richard Devine, Vijay Iyer, Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Robin Rimbaud, Stephen Vitiello, Hal Wilner, and Amnon Wolman. Recent international performances include Donaueschinger Musiktage and the Venice Biennale.

Matanzas Sound Map, Neil Leonard and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons -

Installation at Tate Modern, East Tank (2025)

Leonard’s work is deeply informed by long-term artistic research in Brazil, Cuba, and across the United States. He is the founding Artistic Director of the Interdisciplinary Arts Institute at Berklee College of Music, where he worked for more than three decades, and was a Research Affiliate in the Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT.

Selected 2025 LP and CD releases include The Berklee Sessions (with Robin Rimbaud, Alltagsmusik) and TATE TWENTY FIVE, released by Vinyl Factory to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Tate Modern, featuring Matanzas Sound Map.