Portraits of Angels: An Interview with Queer Artist Leonard Baby about "The Babys"

Four Sisters (2025). Courtesy of Half Gallery and the Artist.

BY EMMA CIESLIK March 22, 2025

This upcoming Wednesday, March 26th, Brooklyn-based painter Leonard Baby is opening his show The Babys at Half Gallery in the East Village. Born in 1996, Baby grew up in a hyperreligious household in Colorado with four sisters, who he describes as his “angels” that helped him survive a strict religious upbringing and conversion therapy. He grew up attending a megachurch near Colorado Springs, and despite his parents separation when he was young, Baby’s father went on to serve as Director of Family Formations at the fundamendalist and intensely homophobic Protestant organization Focus on the Family, also based out of Colorado. 

Ahead of the exhibition’s opening on Wednesday, I sat down with Baby for an interview exploring his journey as an artist and exploring femininity, androgyny, and queerness through the women that loved him fiercely during his formative years. In his paintings, he explores the persecution of femininity and queerness within the evangelical Christian spaces in which he grew up. The exhibition features portrait paintings of his sisters and a group portrait modelled after Balthus’ Three Sisters (1964). Baby acknowledges that Balthus is a controversial artist and wanted to reclaim the composition as an empowering portrait of female defiance. The exhibition also features Girlfriend (2025), a nude portrait of his boyfriend, and a self portrait, Lucretia as a Boy. 

The exhibition also features a small painting of his mother and a sculptural piece--a linen dress form with a 1930s-era ballet costume hung from the gallery ceiling by a rope. This piece is titled Hanged Fourteen Year Old Dancer (2025), and like Lucretia as a Boy (2025), references Baby’s exploration of suicide as a queer person raised in a strict religious family. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Please note, this interview contains discussions of suicide and homophobic slurs. 

Emma Cieslik: In The Babys, you highlight each of your four sisters. Can you share more about your family, and your upbringing?

Leonard Baby: My sisters and I are all really close in age. I have a twin sister, and we all grew up in Colorado and were raised really conservatively. It’s just me and my four sisters. I feel so lucky that I have these four best friends. They’re like icons, and idols in my mind, and I wanted to portray that in these paintings. We went to like this big kind of infamous megachurch in Colorado Springs, and it was very legalistic and fundamentalist. 

My parents separated when I was pretty young, but I think because of religion, divorce was not an option, so they kind of played through this charade of staying married or trying to get back together even though it was obviously not working, but all that to say, I’ve always been and am still pretty close with my mom, but my dad was not in the picture much growing up. He’s still pretty prominently in that world -- Director of Family Formations at Focus on the Family. How ironic, the Director of Family Formations, and none of us talked to him, but yeah, that’s kind of how those things seem to go in that world. 

Cieslik: You describe your sisters as your “angels.” How is this reflected in how they are depicted?

Baby: I’m not sure what inspires that connection other than it’s just a natural phrase that I seem to be stuck on. I am not religious anymore, but I still say things like ‘I’ll pray about that,’ or I say ‘amen’ in agreement a lot.’ My sisters register in my mind as angels. I don’t believe in them in that way, but that seems to be the best word that I can find to describe the way that I feel about them, so I composed these five compositions. 

I'm referencing different art historical archetypes in these compositions. A lot of them naturally have religious influence, but then I’ve also ornamented them with religious references just because that was such a big part of our upbringing, and again, it’s still something that I kind of use as a tool to navigate the world. You know, maybe unfortunately or fortunately. It is kind of stuck with me. I guess I wanted these paintings to have--I think it’s Walter Benjamin who talks about paintings having an aura when you stand in front of them--so I wanted them to have the aura of their personality, but I also wanted to create a literal aura around them, these physical ornamentations of still lives, or icons, or personal visual references. 

One of the paintings in the show is titled You Ruined Them, which is talking about me and my sisters. My parents ruined us, and so holding that dual idea of we are ruined because of the way that we were raised but we’re also these like magical, complex broken but strong individuals. I think both of those things can be true. We’re ruined, but we’re also blessed with empathy through experience. There I go again with religious rhetoric.

Cieslik: How is religion and religious imagery a visual language through which you engage with the world?

Baby: Religion is so married to art history. And because of my upbringing, it’s a language I speak well. As much as I wish that wasn’t the case, it is. I don’t feel like society currently has a need to keep it alive. But it’s what I know well and what I found paramountly beautiful for so much of my life, that maintaining it feels like muscle memory. It is, however, liberating to recontextualize it as a queer person.

Baby in his studio, standing alongside portraits of his sisters Livvy and Izzy. Courtesy of Half Gallery and the Artist. 

Cieslik: Yes, what I’ve loved in your art is this idea of reclaiming religious imagery and terminology for LGBTQ+ people, who for so long have been gatekept out of this space. Is this something that resonates in your art and what does reclamation look like to you?

Baby: I think I’m in the midst of figuring that out right now. I had a really strong concept of a deity when I was growing up, and I think I just replaced my inner monologue or my conscience with fully talking with God. I did that pretty consistently for like 15 years, and that’s hard to get rid of. I think right now I’m trying to figure out if I'm talking to God or if I’m talking to myself, and if there is a God, what do they look like. I guess all of that comes with figuring out if this is something that I want to keep investing in, learning about and justifying. 

I see a lot of queer people not necessarily justifying but recontextualizing religious tropes or passages or ideas that they grew up with and say, ‘well, the Bible didn’t mean this when it said this. It actually meant this.’ I think that’s really admirable, but I guess I’m trying to figure out if that’s worth my time. I guess the past ten years or so have just been like stepping away and needing to take a break from all that and find out what my own beliefs are. Because for so long I think I was just brainwashed. All that said, Christian art is just the best art.

Cieslik: You also include a portrait of your current boyfriend. Why is he important to include in this exhibition? 

Baby: I started his painting without thinking this art would be included in the show. It was just a way for me to keep myself entertained. He's too beautiful not to want to paint constantly. But, it ended up fitting perfectly in this body of work. He grew up religious and closeted as well. He also has four sisters, is the second oldest, is a painter, is a cancer, the list is long. I included a reference to St. Francis in the painting because his approach to animals and people is so gentle and soft. If my sisters are angels, he's a saint. It's titled Girlfriend, and it presents itself differently from the other paintings in my mind. I view it more as an object in the space of the gallery, or like a sculpture, or decorative ornament that enhances the show. Whereas, the paintings of my sisters are portals into their lives. By viewing them, you’re meeting the people I know them to be, at least that’s the hope. His painting is an icon, whereas the paintings of my sisters are idols. 

Cieslik: Your final painting is a self portrait, based on the concept of Lucretia, the ancient Roman heroine who was sexually assaulted by Sextus Tarquinius and after seeking vengeance, stabbed herself to death. How did you visualize yourself as the ancient Roman heroine?

Baby: I knew I wanted a self-portrait in the show, and of course, growing up queer and religious, we know that comes with a slew of mental health challenges, so I wanted to incorporate the concept of suicide in this show because that was a real reality for me, it’s a real reality for all of us. It’s something I think we still haven’t figured out a way to talk about. A solution for most people is to not talk about it, and I think that’s definitely not the answer. So I thought a lot about how to approach this painting and this composition. The Lucretia painting composition is just so powerful and alluring on its own that I couldn’t help but take a whack at it, but also of course, the story of Lucretia deeply resonated. 

I think more than the show being about queer oppression, the show is about feminine oppression, and that’s why I resonated with my sisters so much. It was wrong for me to be myself as a queer person, but it was also wrong for them to just be women. We see that in a very stark way in the story of Lucretia. You’re violently abused, then accused of being a slut. There’s no winning for women or feminine people. It felt like a natural approach.

Cieslik: For many queer people, including myself, we often live in close relationship to death because of the spiritual and violent queerphobia that surrounds us. How does Lucretia’s story resonate with you?

Baby: Oh gosh, that might be too grim of a can of worms to open at this point. Maybe for the next show. I really resonate with your point about queer people living in close proximity to death, and I think the sentiment about women or queer people not being able to win applys here too. Suicide is often described as “selfish” and “a waste” and “cowardly” which I think is absolutely despicable. We push people to deeply feel that there’s no other option, and we shame them even after they’re gone. It’s disgusting. Depression is a disease, and instead of figuring out a way to cure it, we live in a society run by men who do everything in their power to make that disease accelerate and grow. 

Cieslik: I particularly love this portrait because it explores androgyny, femininity, and queerness within an ancient Roman heroine--how is exploration of gender (not just for you but also your sisters and boyfriend) part of The Babys? 

Baby: That’s a good question. I’m not sure how much I was contemplating gender in these paintings so much as I was thinking about femininity. But in my mind, the painting of my youngest sister, where she has her legs open to see up her skirt, is more masculine. It’s sort of a “punk-I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude” I wanted to portray. Whereas when we’ve seen this pose in paintings before, it’s for the pleasure of the male painter or male viewer.

The painting of my boyfriend, where he’s fully nude, registers to me as a very feminine painting, even though his penis is front and center. My hope for that painting was that it felt safe and unscandalous. Even though I’m exploring the reclined pose that’s ushered in a lot of scandal historically.

Girlfriend (2025). Courtesy of Half Gallery and the Artist.

Cieslik: You mention that this show is about not just queer oppression but feminine oppression, how is gender policing examined through your art? Was your gender policed growing up? Were you and your sisters raised in a purity culture?

Baby: Oh my god, don’t even get me started. Purity culture was about 50% of what we were raised on. Purity rings, modesty, the whole 9 yards. If you show skin, of course you’re a slut and a temptress. Never mind boys learning not to be predators. The other 50% was the pro life movement. But of course, those go hand in hand. I guess I’m not accounting for whatever percentage belongs to “real men do” blank.

Gender policing was at the center of these paintings when I was thinking about them, although I don’t know how effective that comes across in the end. Feminine liberation is a real threat to conservative people and I’m still trying to figure out why, but making these paintings was an attempt to chip away at that and come to a better understanding of why that is.

Cieslik: How is this exhibition your coming out experience? I know for myself and others raised in strict religious households, coming out often happens later in life and it’s not a single moment. What motivated this coming out?

Baby: I never really came out. I got called gay and a faggot a lot in grade school, so I think they always had an idea. When I moved to New York to escape that world, people just met me as queer, so it didn’t feel like I was coming out to anyone because I was making all these new relationships, and for a long time I just operated on a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” basis with the people I grew up with or extended family. But this is the first time I’m really saying it. It’s the first time it’s in writing, which is terrifying but of course liberating. My sisters and my mom will be there, and I couldn’t be more excited. 

An opening reception for The Babys will be held at the Half Gallery on Wednesday, March 26th from 6-8 pm. The Babys will be on display until April 24, 2025.