Donald Ryan Gallery presents an exhibition of works by Leslie Bohnenkamp (1943 – 1997), an American artist whose sculptural and drawing practices developed in the 1970s at the intersection of postwar abstraction, craft, and gender politics. 

Born in West Point, Iowa, Bohnenkamp served in the U.S. Navy before earning a master’s degree in textile design from the University of Iowa. In the early 1970s he was awarded a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a formative period during which his work shifted decisively toward sculpture. 

After moving to New York in 1975, Bohnenkamp encountered a large quantity of discarded rolls of heavyweight paper on the sidewalk outside a SoHo belt manufacturer, where the material was used as industrial backing for the hole punching process. He began working with the paper by hand, and it became a central material in his practice. Like many Minimalist artists of the period, he drew directly from the industrial fabric of downtown New York. Yet where Minimalism often translated such encounters into monumentality and finish, Bohnenkamp redirected an industrial castoff, through sustained hand labor, into forms marked by corporal presence, contingency, and humor. 

In the Herds series, Bohnenkamp gathers numerous small, near-identical paper forms into clusters. Through repetition, scale, and exoskeletal-like surfaces, the works evoke organic and bodily structures formed through growth and accretion. The groupings recall the childhood experience where inanimate objects are anthropomorphized through imagination, hovering between recognition and invention. The forms feel plausible without corresponding to anything identifiable. Behaving like bodies, they appear to sag, cluster, and hold themselves together, activating a physical awareness grounded in weight, precarity, and touch. Their meaning registers through accumulation and proximity.

There is an innocent and childlike sense of wonder toward nature in Bohnenkamp’s work. In his paper constructions, he creates three-dimensional views of the moon, seen as if through a bedroom window. The moon appears distant, small, and often fractured, present as something visible but not possessed, held at a remove rather than resolved into meaning. In these works, minimalism and childlike thought draw close to one another, intersecting at the level of essence where reduction does not assert authority but loosens it. What comes into view is a mode of attention oriented toward potential.

During the 1970s, Bohnenkamp exhibited in New York, including a 1976 exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery and a monographic presentation of his paper sculptures in 1979. His work later receded from view following an accident that limited his ability to continue working at the same scale and intensity. This exhibition offers an opportunity to reconsider Bohnenkamp’s contribution within broader histories of postwar sculpture and material practice.