Leilah Weinraub

Leilah Weinraub’s The Kids unfolds across video, performance, and a billboard-scale work. Its starting point is the facades of Lower Manhattan, where carved figures—caryatids, gargoyles, and others—loom over the financial core of the city. In Weinraub’s hands, these stone supports stir: scratching, leaning, shifting under pressure. The work takes aim at the game of being “larger than life.” In the gallery the video animates these supports and tests what they carry. On the terrace, the billboard-scale work echoes advertising and capital but also undercuts them. Together they frame youth culture as structure itself—fragile and monumental, restless and exhausted, alive with rage and ambition. The gestures speak to the impossible mission given to young people: to embody the future while surviving the present. 

This trajectory runs through Weinraub’s practice. She was a cofounder of the fashion label Hood By Air, which channeled youth angst and energy from underground spaces into the mainstream, and directed the film SHAKEDOWN (2018), which documented the explicit performances and intimate world of a Black-owned and -operated lesbian strip club in Los Angeles. In The Kids, youth are recast as both monument and movement: the columns that hold culture up and the force that breaks it open.

Leilah Weinraub was born in 1979 in Los Angeles. An artist, film director, and performer, Weinraub is best known for the underground documentary Shakedown (2018). Her latest film, Seek No Favor (2025), codirected with Elle Clay, premieres at the BlackStar Film Festival. Weinraub recently held a residency at New Theater Hollywood, where her performance work evolved in dialogue with her cinematic practice. Recent solo presentations include Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York (2018) and What Pipeline, Detroit (2018). Group exhibitions include the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2021); Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway (2021); Performa, New York (2021); Sullivan Galleries, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2019); Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York (2018); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017). Weinraub studied at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH, and the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.