ev Leto

MFA Student Sculpture

ev Leto (they/them; b. 1982, New Jersey, d. 2025, Pennsylvania) was a multidisciplinary artist and writer. Their practice centered the fat, queer, trans body as a site of transformation, exploitation, and a tool of liberation. Their works accumulated excessive de-commodified labor and playfully weaponized humor; probing the politics of queerness through performance, video, sculpture, poetics, and print media.

At the time of their passing, Leto was completing their Master of Fine Arts work in Sculpture at the Tyler School of Art & Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. They hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Middle Tennessee State University, a Master of Arts in Printmaking from the University of Iowa, and a Graduate Certificate in Book Arts from the University of Iowa Center for the Book.

Artist Statement

Is queer (or fat, or trans, or disabled) a skill?

My practice is an internal dialogue, evidence of my transformation, an accumulation of repetitive physical and emotional labor. Spoken in the language of protest, permission to expand as needed. Printed in the language of poetry, repeating, repeating. Queerness in all its forms, the ultimate relief. Perfection, the ultimate defeat. I’m not asking for the world to be different so I can fit into it; I am proof that I already belong.

Watch me.

I gravitate toward constructing and interacting with ephemeral materials such as: tape, paper, foam, raw clay, food. The unstable nature of their output mirrors the temporality of existing in a body and helps me uncover the potentiality of queerness in both process and form. I want the evidence (scars) of exposure (survival) to be clear on the material (skin). This does cause damage (changes) which I would call experience (growth).

Humor in my work is not a shield; it’s a scalpel. When I nap in a hot dog bed or give a webinar on butt munching, I’m not making light, I’m making space to confront deep and often shamed truths. My perishable, playful material collaborators invite decay, thus inviting care. What is possible when we stop shrinking ourselves (literally and linguistically) and instead choose unapologetic joy as a strategy for truth-telling and refusal?

Through embodied research, I investigate the liberatory potential of softness, humor, and bodily excess. I give myself permission to be in relationship with material for your consumption, using the erotic and humorous outcomes to somatically unpack internalized bias. These works present my body rebelling against conformity and expectation, surviving the experience of space, leaning into another body for support, insisting on the room to expand freely and, above all, deserving of rest.