“What do you want? I’ll make you anything you want.” For American painter Leidy Churchman, painting is a medium of limitless possibility – an open-ended practice through which anything can take form. In this conversation that covers early creative impulses, gender identity to Buddhist philosophy and the joyful chaos of artistic process, Leidy Churchman offers a personal account of painting as both an expressive freedom and a form of spiritual attention.
“I think painting is, to me, the easiest in the way that you can make anything with paint. So it’s like there’s one medium—paint—and I can go to my paint and decide to make anything I want,” Leidy Churchman says. “To paint is to have everything at your fingertips.”
Known for an eclectic body of work that includes everything from landscapes to logos, Leidy Churchman resists rigid stylistic categories. They describe painting as a practice rooted in presence, embodiment, and openness rather than in fixed outcomes: “I don’t have an end goal. It doesn’t have to look a certain way. It all has to do with my own embodiment, my experience in the world and what I’ve worked hard to authentically be – kind of holding the feminine and masculine in a physical way.”
The interview traces Leidy Churchman’s journey from an unconventional childhood education through Hampshire College’s experimental environment, and on to the collaborative queer art scene of early 2000s New York. There, Leidy Churchman became involved with LTTR, a feminist genderqueer artist collective and journal known for its radical inclusivity and experimental ethos. Leidy Churchman recalls it as “a really generous situation with lots of cool queer people experimenting together.”
Throughout the conversation, Leidy Churchman returns to the idea of painting as an intuitive, even playful act of attention: “I think that art is kind of a byproduct of that time, of being in a space and letting it flow and watching that mind… It’s not the same as meditation – it’s more like play.”
Leidy Churchman (b. 1979, Pennsylvania, USA) is an American painter known for a wide-ranging visual language that draws on Buddhist philosophy, queer identity, and contemporary culture. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Kunsthalle Bern, and the Hessel Museum of Art. Leidy Churchman lives and works in New York City.
Leidy Churchman was interviewed by Nanna Rebekka in their Studio in Manhattan, New York in May 2023.
Editor and producer: Nanna Rebekka
Camera: Sean Hanley
Music:
Robert Lewis (Fold Music | Levels / Upright)
Camille Delafon (Cézame Original Scores / Upright)
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025.
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