Deb Leal: Abre Camino
OSMOS presents the first New York solo exhibition of Mexican-American artist Deb Leal, featuring photographs created between 2020 and 2023. Abre Camino brings together a body of work that reflects on cultural inheritance, spiritual symbolism, and the evolving visual language of Chicano identity in the United States.
Leal’s practice focuses on the imagery embedded in everyday American life—cars, devotional objects, domestic interiors, roadside details—and considers how these elements carry meaning across generations. Drawing from personal memory, she recalls formative road trips from the Midwest to Corpus Christi, Texas, where endurance, shared rituals, and vast landscapes shaped her early understanding of narrative and image-making.
Influenced by familial histories and syncretic spiritual traditions such as Curanderismo, Leal approaches photography as both reflection and offering. Through saturated color, layered compositions, and subtle double exposures, she evokes the texture of memory—fragmented yet enduring. Her images move between the quotidian and the sacred, suggesting how cultural symbols persist and transform amid social, ecological, and technological change.
As contemporary life accelerates, Abre Camino asks what happens to the icons that once defined identity. By reinterpreting them through contemporary photographic processes, Leal positions Chicano expression as a living visual and spiritual language—one that continues to articulate regional identity within the broader American cultural landscape. The photographs function simultaneously as archive and act of devotion, sustaining collective memory in an era shaped by obsolescence and surveillance.
About the Author
Roadside culture plays a formative role in the practice of Mexican-American photographer Deb Leal (b. Corpus Christi, Texas; raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin). Shaped by cross-country road trips throughout her youth, her work reflects an early immersion in the visual language of highways, devotional objects, cars, and vernacular landscapes. Drawing from these experiences, Leal examines cultural memory, iconography, and the regional nuances of the American experience through a distinctly Chicana lens. Leal was selected for the 2025 CPW–Kingston Portfolio Review and The New York Portfolio Review, and she received a nomination for the 2026 TED Fellowship. She has completed commissions for The New York Times Magazine, Bon Appétit, and Byline. Her work is included in the archives of OSMOS Magazine #39, Fotofilmic JRNL 22, Musée Magazine no. 26: Spaces, and Aesthetica’s Future Now 2023. Her exhibitions include The International Center of Photography and Photoville at Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York, as well as the de Young Art Museum and the Tenderloin Museum in San Francisco. Leal is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.
Deb Leal: Abre Camino
February 12 – March 21, 2026
OSMOS – New York, NY 10003
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