text:
Meet the Chicago 400: Lessons in the Carceral State
Winter Term 2020
The Drawing Center is pleased to announce its third Winter Term, an initiative that investigates drawing as a tool for addressing inequity and encouraging social change. Building upon themes presented in the exhibition The Pencil Is a Key: Drawings by Incarcerated Artists, The Drawing Center has partnered with the Chicago 400, a grassroots campaign of formerly incarcerated and convicted people experiencing homelessness in Chicago, and artist, policy advocate, and researcher Laurie Jo Reynolds. This iteration of Winter Term explores the intersection of drawing and criminal justice reform, specifically as it relates to fearbased policies, the unintended consequences of public registration laws, and the expansion of the carceral state.
Winter Term 2020 begins on January 21, 2020 with an exhibition of drawings produced by the Chicago 400 and culminates with a public symposium on Saturday, January 25, 2020, featuring programming that expands upon the Chicago 400's ongoing advocacy work. All events are free and open to the public.
With work that operates at the juncture of legislative reform and artistic practice, Laurie Jo Reynolds challenges the demonization, warehousing, and social exclusion of people in the criminal legal system. Her recent work focuses on conviction registries, housing banishment laws, and public exclusion zones, which destabilize families and lead to homelessness, unemployment, and re-incarceration. Reynolds is an Assistant Professor of Public Art, Public Policy, and Media in the Department of Art at the University of Illinois at Chicago. As part of her ongoing advocacy work, Reynolds is currently coordinating an alliance to support the Chicago 400.
The Chicago 400 are Chicagoans with past convictions who are listed on a public conviction registry—most of whom are also subject to lifelong housing and public space banishment. Because they are also experiencing homelessness, they must report and re-register weekly at Chicago Police Headquarters. The penalties for missing even one day of registration are extreme—often resulting in a prison sentence or a decade of additional registration time. This complex maze of laws often forces people and their families into dire situations, such as sleeping in their cars, camping overnight outside the police station, living in trains and buses, losing employment, and becoming homeless with their families.
The Chicago 400 work with a variety of partners—including victim, criminal justice, and housing advocates, as well as reentry specialists, treatment providers, prison watchdog groups, and faith ministries—in an effort to direct scarce state resources toward proven policies for public safety. Together, the Chicago 400 and their partners seek to reduce victimization, support crime survivors, and allow people with past convictions to meet their essential needs and return to full citizenship. They are currently working to introduce reform legislation in January 2020.
In weekly meetings, the Chicago 400 produce visual materials including hand-drawn diagrams and maps that depict the logistics of carrying out registration laws, including their weekly journeys to the police station. These drawings have allowed the group to communicate their experiences to legislators and other system stakeholders, for whom these laws and their impact are largely invisible.
Scheduled Programming
Coffee with Laurie Jo Reynolds and Maya Szilak
Thursday, January 23, 12–3pm
Artist, policy advocate, and researcher Laurie Jo Reynolds will be present in the exhibition space, along with Maya Szilak, Research and Policy Counsel, John Howard Association of Illinois, and other special guests, to engage with visitors and answer questions about the works on view. Reynolds and Szilak will welcome conversations on any topic—including art education, risk assessments, prison monitoring, Howard Finster, metaphors for finish lines, and direct-mail campaign ads.
Drawing Workshop with the Chicago 400
Friday January 24, 4–7pm
Join the Chicago 400 for an interactive drawing workshop inspired by the visual materials, including hand-drawn diagrams and maps, presented in the exhibition.
Our Fellow Americans: A Symposium on Public Conviction Registries
Saturday January 25, 12–6pm | Please see below for full schedule of programs
12–1pm | "We Carry the Laws Out": Opening Reception + Exhibition Walkthrough
Join members of the Chicago 400 Art Committee for a walkthrough of the exhibition of drawings that diagram and depict how they follow the registry regime and housing and public space banishment laws.
Participants include: John Cameron, Art Committee, Chicago 400; Sid Hughes, Art Committee Co-Chair, Chicago 400; J.J., Art Committee, Chicago 400; Clifford Kight, Art Committee Co-Chair, Chicago 400; Scott McFarland, Chicago 400 Alliance
1–1:45pm | Meet the Chicago 400: Lessons in the Carceral State
Learn more about the Chicago 400's unique arts and organizing campaign to reform registry and banishment laws. Panelists will explain the organizing strategy, how art is a transformative part of the work, and how they are advocating for policies that prevent victimization - support survivors, hold people accountable for harm, but then let people move on with their lives after they have served their time. They will also discuss the disproportionate impact these laws have on poor people of color.
Participants include: Gary Dabney, Bronx, N.Y. resident experiencing homelessness because of N.Y. laws; Michael Moore, Legislative Committee, Chicago 400; Laurie Jo Reynolds, Coordinator, Chicago 400 Alliance; Zakiyyah Seifullah, Legislative Committee, Chicago 400; Maya Szilak, Research and Policy Counsel, John Howard Association of Illinois
2:15–3:30pm | Let Us Try to Explain This: New Yorkers Are Detained in Locked Facilities Because They Can't Find Housing That Doesn't Exist
Visitors to the exhibition may wonder if there are similar registration policies in New York, or a campaign to address them. Indeed, New York also has policies with extreme unintended consequences. Learn about the people impacted, the constitutionality of this arrangement, and strategies to address this crisis from legal experts, advocates, and people who have been through this system.
Participants include: Allison Frankel, Aryeh Neier Fellow, Human Rights Watch/ACLU, New York; Emily Horowitz, Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice, St. Francis College, Brooklyn; author of Protecting Our Kids?: How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing UsCharles King, Chief Executive Officer, Housing Works, New York; Robert Newman, Legal Aid Society, Criminal Defense Practice, Special Litigation Unit, New York; and counsel for Richard Alcantara in Alcantara v. Annucci; Robert O., Directly impacted-person and advocate for reform of housing banishment laws, New York; Pauline Syrnik, Fellow, Legal Aid Society, Criminal Appeals Bureau, New York; Amber Vlangas, Survivor, registry-impacted family member; Advocacy Chair for the Center for Rational Justice Studies.
4–4:45pm | The Logic of the Punitive State
J.R. Packingham was convicted of a felony for saying "Thank you Jesus" on a public Facebook post. He decided to challenge it, ultimately taking the case to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously that his First Amendment rights were violated. Using this rare victory as a point of departure, Goldberg will discuss strategies for addressing the expansive reach of the carceral state. Lancaster will historicize this discussion by exploring the complicated relationship between sexuality and punishment in our society, the modern suburban culture of fear, and the punitive logic that has put down deep roots in everyday American life.
Participants include: David T. Goldberg, constitutional and public law litigator in the U.S. Supreme Court and federal and state appellate courts, and counsel for J.R. Packingham in Packingham v. North Carolina; Roger Lancaster, Professor of Anthropology and Cultural Studies, George Mason University, Washington DC; author of Sex Panic and the Punitive State; Willie Trent, directly-impacted person and advocate, New York Sex Offense Policy Work Group
5–6pm | Closing Reception
Join organizers, presenters, and other policy advocates for a closing reception of the show and the symposium.
6–8pm | Next Steps Mixer and Dinner (organized by the New York Action Alliance & co-sponsored by the New York Sex Offense Working Group)
The New York Action Alliance and The Chicago 400 are co-hosting a "Next Steps" Mixer to bring together professionals, advocates, those directly impacted, and/or anyone else interested in helping New York and other states become leaders in transforming their public conviction registry laws.
Sign up to join us at a restaurant within walking distance of the Drawing Center for a light, buffet-style meal. Please RSVP → by 1/17/20.
Winter Term 2020: The Chicago 400: Lessons in the Carceral State is organized by Rosario Güiraldes, Assistant Curator. Our Fellow Americans: A Symposium on Public Conviction Registries is organized by Bill Dobbs, Emily Horowitz, David T. Goldberg, Laurie Jo Reynolds, Jill K. Sanders, and Pauline Syrnik, with support from the New York Action Alliance and the New York Sex Offense Working Group.
Winter Term 2020: The Chicago 400: Lessons in the Carceral State is made possible by the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. Special thanks to Art for Justice and Open Society Foundations, along with Chicago partner organizations Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, Treatment Alternative for Safe Communities (TASC), Kolbe House Jail Ministry, and John Howard Association of Illinois.
Image: Sid Hughes, Map depicting the enforcement of registration laws. Courtesy of the Chicago 400.
The Pencil Is a Key
Drawings by Incarcerated Artists
The Pencil Is a Key is an exhibition of historical and contemporary drawings by incarcerated people from all over the globe. Works by artists who were or currently are prisoners will be juxtaposed with drawings by prisoners who became artists while incarcerated. Examples include drawings by political prisoners like Gustave Courbet, who was held in Saint Pélagie Prison for his role in the Paris Commune uprising of 1871; artists incarcerated during World War II as noncombatents like Hans Bellmer, who was interned in France, and a young Ruth Asawa, who was interned by the US government because she was a Japanese American; as well as artists in Soviet Gulags, Apartheid-era South Africa, in Central and South American countries under military dictatorships, and in the post-Arab Spring Middle East. The exhibition will also present drawings by members of contemporary American prison populations who found their talent through prison art programs, as well as collections of works by anonymous contemporary artist incarcerates working in drawing genres specific to prison life, like "Paños Chicanos" drawn on handkerchiefs, or envelope drawings meant to be sold or delivered through the mail.
Drawing is vital to those in captivity; it is a vehicle through which they proclaim their individuality, express their hope, and imagine their freedom. The drawings featured in this exhibition present powerful evidence of the persistence of human creativity in the most inhumane of circumstances and argue for the necessity of art—in the form of drawing—to the life of every human being. Created in extreme circumstances, the drawings in this show are weapons in the fight for justice, records that bear witness to terrible circumstances, containers of memory, and portals to a better future. Their very existence is of great significance, but their genius offers the proof of drawing's purpose as well as the clearest explanation of why institutions like The Drawing Center must continue to present art to the public.
Organized by the curatorial team at The Drawing Center: Claire Gilman, Rosario Güiraldes, Laura Hoptman, Isabella Kapur, and Duncan Tomlin.
The Pencil Is a Key: Drawings by Incarcerated Artists is made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Agnes Gund, Lonti Ebers, and the Director's Circle of The Drawing Center.
Additional support is provided by Allen Adler and Frances Beatty Adler; Burger Collection, Hong Kong; Svetlana Kuzmicheva-Uspenskaya; Dita Amory; Rashid Johnson and Sheree Hovsepian; Fiona and Eric Rudin; and Anonymous.
Support for the exhibition catalogue is provided by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.
Special thanks to albertz benda, Andrew Edlin Gallery, David Zwirner, Donald Ellis Gallery, Galerie Buchholz, Galeria Nara Roesler, Gavlak Gallery and Ubu Gallery, New York.
Image: Azza Abo Rebieh (1980–), Nayfeh, 2016. Pencil on paper. Courtesy of the artist.
Wasteland: Open Sessions 16
Wasteland marks the fifth iteration of Open Sessions, a six-part exhibition program presented between October 2018 and January 2020 at The Drawing Center. Organized by curators Rosario Güiraldes and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions fosters a dynamic, ever-evolving dialogue with new drawing practices and practitioners, exhibiting and contextualizing the work of early career artists who explore the nature of drawing in its many manifestations through conversation, public programs, and thematic group exhibitions.
Featuring works by Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Crystal Z Campbell, Theodore Darst, Jonathan Ehrenberg, Young Joo Lee, Omid Shekari, and Tariku Shiferaw, Wasteland explores image production as an excessive physiological and psychological stimulus. The artists speculate on how digital media, virtual borders, surveillance, and violence impacts our perception, presenting artworks that include a fragmented revolver cast in body parts; animations of abstract landscapes along international borders; minimalist drawings that reflect distortions of the body; and images that depict an anonymous woman relaxing in the grass before the Tulsa race massacre in 1921.
Participating Artists
Esteban Cabeza de Baca is an artist based in New York City and Amsterdam. Born in the border town of San Ysidro, CA (USA).,Cabeza de Baca challenges the loss of natural resources and reanimates pre-Columbian mythologies in the Americas with artworks that juxtapose representational imagery and abstraction.
Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist and writer from Oklahoma who traces the historical lineage of bias, otherness, and the space between the subject and the witness. Her art and writing considers the history of drawing in relation to present modes of capturing subjects, digital recognition, and image artifacts. Campbell is a former Whitney Museum Independent Study Studio Program fellow and is currently a fourth-year Tulsa Artist Fellow.
Theodore Darst draws on digital sources—high-resolution 3D animation, iPhone screen recording, hand-drawn animation, and re-photographed appropriated footage—to create linear collages that reflect the twenty-first-century cultural landscape.
Jonathan Ehrenberg is an artist based in New York City. Ehrenberg combines analog and digital media to describe a seemingly coherent world that is pieced together from sensory information and images from memories, fantasies, dreams, and associations. Ehrenberg received a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Yale University. His work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, SculptureCenter, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York; Futura Center, Prague; The B3 Biennial, Frankfurt; Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn; and Nara Roesler, São Paulo, and reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Art in America. Previous residencies include LMCC Workspace, Harvestworks, Triangle, Skowhegan, New York; the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; and Glenfiddich, Scotland.
Young Joo Lee combines inspirations from her dreams with personal and political histories to create drawings, sculptures, animation, and films. The content of her work often derives from her experience as an immigrant living in Germany and the United States. She is currently a College Fellow in Media Practice at Harvard University, teaching and researching on immersive storytelling using mixed media.
Omid Shekari makes art in order to capture universal stories about how institutional or state enforced violence impacts the human experience. His projects investigate how the state, as a military institution, has the power to use fear and rationalize military intervention in the name of national protection. Recent exhibitions include those at Marginal Utility Gallery, Philadelphia; NADA, New York; Greenfield Community College, Greenfield; Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia; Ohio State University, Columbus; PAFA Museum, Philadelphia; Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia; Gallery Joe, Philadelphia; and Pelham Art Center, New York. Shekari is currently based in Oberlin, OH, and is a visiting assistant professor at Oberlin College.
Tariku Shiferaw is an artist based in New York City. His work explores mark-making to address the physical, metaphysical, and political spaces of art production, and reimagines how blackness might be represented through the drawing medium. Shiferaw is a current participant in the Independent Study Studio Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
About Open Sessions
Open Sessions builds on The Drawing Center's longstanding legacy of championing work by early career artists who explore the nature of drawing in its many manifestations. Organized by curators Rosario Güiraldes and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions is a two-year program created as a platform for artists to find new approaches for contextualizing and exhibiting their work, through conversation, public programs, and thematic group exhibitions.
Artists selected for Open Sessions 2018–20 include: Joeun Aatchim, Kenseth Armstead, Bahar Behbahani, Keren Benenisty, Katarina Burin, Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Alex Callender, Crystal Z Campbell, Ludovica Carbotta, Jesse Chun, Liz Collins, Mike Crane, Dennis RedMoon Darkeem, Theodore Darst, Billy and Steven Dufala, Jonathan Ehrenberg, Carolina Fusilier, Rachel Granofsky, LaMont Hamilton, Kunlin He, Victoria Keddie, Young Joo Lee, Lux Lindner, Sharon Madanes, Guadalupe Maravilla, Zatara McIntyre, Ester Partegàs, Omid Shekari, Tariku Shiferaw, Johanna Unzueta, Cosmo Whyte.
Open Sessions is made possible by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Further Forward Foundation, and, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Image: Young Joo Lee, Borderline, 2019. Animation, Duration: 5:30 mins. Courtesy the artist.
Open Sessions 15
Point of Departure marks the fourth iteration of Open Sessions, a six-part exhibition program presented between October 2018 and January 2020 at The Drawing Center. Organized by curators Rosario Güiraldes and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions fosters a dynamic, ever-evolving dialogue with new drawing practices and practitioners, exhibiting and contextualizing the work of early career artists who explore the nature of drawing in its many manifestations through conversation, public programs, and thematic group exhibitions.
The works on view—by Bahar Behbahani, Keren Benbenisty, Katarina Burin, Jesse Chun, Carolina Fusilier, and Rachel Granofsky—draw inspiration from American artist Paul Thek's imaginative and unconventional approach to the medium of drawing. When Thek taught art classes at The Cooper Union in the late 1970s, he gave his students a list of eccentric instructions titled, "Teaching Notes: 4-Dimensional Design." Using Thek's notes as a springboard, the artists in Point of Departure created their own set of directives, combining reason and imagination to reconsider their own artistic processes. The directives' correlating artworks include drawings for the transportation of people, memories, and belongings; renderings of disappeared Palestinian villages from 1948 to the present; as well as personal memories of civic designs in the former Yugoslavia.
Participating Artists
Bahar Behbahani is an artist based in New York City. Her research-based practice, which includes painting, video, installation, and community engagement, weaves layers of archival material and cartographic and horticultural historical documents to produce compositions both political and poetic. Recent exhibitions include the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire; Experimental Media And Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytech, Troy, NY; Thomas Erben Gallery, New York City; The 11th Shanghai Biennale; 7th Moscow Biennale; Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, Athens; The Tribeca Film Festival, New York City; the Asia Art Biennial, Bangladesh; among others. Behbahani is a Creative Capital (2019) Grant Awardee.
Keren Benbenisty is an artist based in New York City. Benbenisty's practice examines our relationship to history by revealing both the ancient and modern constructs hidden beneath the surface of contemporary life. Recent exhibitions include those at A.I.R Gallery, Brooklyn; Soloway, Brooklyn; Mishkan Ein Harod, Israel; Petach Tikva Museum, Israel; Ulterior Gallery, New York City; The James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center for Humanities, New York City; Tel-Aviv Museum of Art; Genia Schreiber University Gallery, Tel Aviv; The Artist House,Jerusalem; Francesca Antonini Gallery, Rome; and Human Resources, Los Angeles.
Katarina Burin is an artist based in Cambridge, MA. Burin's artwork includes sculpture, drawing, text, and installation. Katarina has recently received a Now+There Public Art grant, a Graham Foundation grant, and was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Recent solo exhibitions include Usdan Gallery at Bennington College, Neubauer Collegium of the University of Chicago, and ViPer in Prague. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Providence College Galleries in December, 2019 and Anthony Greaney in October 2019, as well as at Significant Other in Vienna in February 2020. Burin is currently lecturer at Harvard's Art, Film and Visual Studies department.
Jesse Chun is an artist based in New York City. Chun investigates systems of language, through a variety of materials—such as aluminum, graphite, and latex—to render anew various watermarks used for official documents, certificates, and diplomas. Chun has exhibited at the Queens Museum, New York City; BAM, New York City; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York City; and Oakville Galleries, Ontario, Canada. Select commissions and awards include the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship at ISCP (2019); Triple Canopy (2018); BRIC Media Arts Fellowship (2017); and a solo public commission at the Brooklyn Bridge Park (2016).
Carolina Fusilier is an artist based in Mexico City. Fusilier's artwork includes video, painting, sound compositions, and installations. She has recently received The Pollock- Krasner Foundation Grant and a grant from the Jumex Foundation in Mexico City. Recent solo exhibitions include those at Locust Projects, Miami; Natalia Hug Gallery, Cologne, Germany; SOMA, Mexico City; and La Fábrica, Buenos Aires..Recent group exhibitions include those at the Sculpture Center, New York City; Vacation Gallery, New York City; Biquini Wax, Mexico City; and CCU Tlatelolco, Mexico City.
Rachel Granofsky is an artist based in New York City. Granofsky's photographs are constructed with paint, fabric, paper, charcoal, and tape applied directly onto the surface of walls, furniture, and household objects to compose an environment that mimics the single point of view of the camera lens. She recently had a solo exhibition at Rachel Ufner Gallery in New York City and group exhibitions at various venues in South Africa, Germany, Sweden, Canada, and the United States.
About Open Sessions
Open Sessions builds on The Drawing Center's longstanding legacy of championing work by early career artists who explore the nature of drawing in its many manifestations. Organized by curators Rosario Güiraldes and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions is a two-year program created as a platform for artists to find new approaches for contextualizing and exhibiting their work, through conversation, public programs, and thematic group exhibitions.
Artists selected for Open Sessions 2018–20 include: Joeun Aatchim, Kenseth Armstead, Bahar Behbahani, Keren Benenisty, Katarina Burin, Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Alex Callender, Crystal Z Campbell, Ludovica Carbotta, Jesse Chun, Liz Collins, Mike Crane, Dennis RedMoon Darkeem, Theodore Darst, Billy and Steven Dufala, Jonathan Ehrenberg, Carolina Fusilier, Rachel Granofsky, LaMont Hamilton, Kunlin He, Victoria Keddie, Young Joo Lee, Lux Linder, Sharon Madanes, Guadalupe Maravilla, Zatara McIntyre, Ester Partegàs, Omid Shekari, Tariku Shiferaw, Johanna Unzueta, Cosmo Whyte.
Open Sessions is made possible by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Further Forward Foundation, and, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Image: Keren Benbenisty,
The Place of the Fold
(still), 2018. Two-channel video and sound installation from the project Fajja, 12 minutes.
Inka Essenhigh
As part of its ongoing series of commissions for the Stairwell, The Drawing Center has asked New York artist Inka Essenhigh to create a site-specific wall drawing. Essenhigh's installation is the third in the series, following Gary Simmons's Ghost Reels (2016–18) and Abdelkader Benchamma's Dark Matter (2015–16).
An artist whose influences range from Hokusai to Surrealism and Byzantine icons to graphic novels, Inka Essenhigh is known for her hallucinatory scenes that weave narratives about everyday life with otherworldly and science-fiction themes. For her panoramic installation in The Drawing Center's stairwell, Essenhigh illustrates the story of an imaginary contest staged on a New York City street in which new glass-and-steel condominiums with human attributes engage in a showdown with the city's more conventional buildings. Drawn directly on the wall, Essenhigh's anthropomorphic buildings encircle the central motif of the drawing, a golden sunset that replicates "Manhattanhenge"—the effect of the sun when aligned precisely with the city grid—which has long been a mythic part of the city's monumental architecture.
Organized by Brett Littman, Executive Director.
Inka Essenhigh: Manhattanhenge is made possible through the support of Miles McEnery Gallery and Stacey and Rob Goergen.
Image: Installation view of Inka Essenhigh: Manhattanhenge. The Drawing Center, New York, 2018. Photograph by Martin Parsekian.
Open Sessions 2018-2020
What's Love Got to Do with It?
Join us on August 15 from 6-8pm for the Opening Reception of Open Sessions 2018–2020: What's Love Got to Do with It? No RSVP needed.
Open Sessions 2018–2020: What's Love Got to Do with It? is an exhibition by the thirty-one artists who are participating in Open Sessions, a two-year program at The Drawing Center that provides opportunities for selected artists from around the world to contextualize their work in terms of drawing through conversation, public programs, and exhibitions. Featuring new drawings and drawing adjacent works by a diverse and international group of artists, who come from myriad perspectives and geographic locations, ranging from the Americas to Africa, Asia and the Middle East, What's Love Got to Do With It? takes as its theme, the universal discourse of love, which, the curators contend, is as democratic as drawing is.
The question of drawing and love is operative in the work of Guadalupe Maravilla, when he traces his personal history of displacement from El Salvador to the United States, and interrogates the parallels between North American and pre-Columbian cultures to critique border politics. In the artwork of Alex Callender, drawing is employed to draw constellations based on the seemingly invisible labor of workers, diagramming economic decline caused by colonialism and globalization. In Victoria Keddie's electromagnetic drawings, one's own awareness of place and time is fine-tuned through a feedback loop of signal and noise. Perhaps the clearest example of the connection of drawing to the theme of love is articulated by Liz Collins' long scroll drawn by the collective activity of people coming together to draw. Translations of the drawing medium in video, performance, three dimensional notation and non conventional mark-making, the works in What's Love Got to Do with It? celebrate drawing with irreverence and wit. And most definitely with love.
Organized by Rosario Güiraldes and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions Curators
Participating artists:
Joeun Kim Aatchim
Kenseth Armstead
Bahar Behbahani
Keren Benbenisty
Katarina Burin
Esteban Cabeza de Baca
Alex Callender
Crystal Z Campbell
Ludovica Carbotta
Jesse Chun
Liz Collins
Mike Crane
Dennis RedMoon Darkeem
Theodore Darst
Billy and Steven Dufala
Jonathan Ehrenberg
Carolina Fusilier
Rachel Granofsky
LaMont Hamilton
Kunlin He
Victoria Keddie
Young Joo Lee
Lux Lindner
Sharon Madanes
Guadalupe Maravilla
Zatara McIntyre
Ester Partegàs
Omid Shekari
Tariku Shiferaw
Johanna Unzueta
Cosmo Whyte
Open Sessions is made possible by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Further Forward Foundation, and, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Image: Kunlin He, 2092: Tale of Moon Trip, 2019. Acrylic and ink drawing on aluminum, mylar, and acrylic sheet, 132 x 72 inches. Courtesy of the artist and NanHai Art.
Neo Rauch
Aus dem Boden / From the Floor
PRESS Read Time Out's interview with Neo Rauch HERE.
This spring, The Drawing Center will present Neo Rauch: Aus dem Boden / From the Floor, the first exhibition entirely devoted to his drawings in the United States. Neo Rauch is one of the best-known artists from the Leipzig school in Germany. His psychologically complex paintings have been widely collected and written about for more than twenty years. Featuring more than one hundred fifty never or rarely seen works that span over thirty years of Rauch's career, this exhibition will present drawing as an essential but often overlooked aspect of his oeuvre. A collaboration between The Drawing Center and the Des Moines Art Center, the show was presented first in Des Moines from September 27, 2018–January 6, 2019.
The drawings, which Rauch describes as "dreams on paper," are made during periods of intense painting activity and are left on the floor of the studio for his assistant to pick up and place in flat files for storage. Rauch, who never makes preparatory sketches or drawings before he begins painting, uses the medium instead to mine his own subconscious and to visualize characters and scenarios for the works in progress. His drawings range from thumbnail compositional sketches for paintings, to phone doodles, to figure and landscape studies, and to more formal and completed works.
Co-organized by Brett Littman, former Executive Director of The Drawing Center, and Jeff Fleming, Director of the Des Moines Art Center, with Amber Harper, former Assistant Curator at The Drawing Center.
Neo Rauch: Aus dem Boden / From the Floor is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. A major contribution to the exhibition was made by The Robert Lehman Foundation, with additional support from David Zwirner, Raymond Learsy, and Gaa Gallery. Special thanks to Allen Adler for his support of the catalogue and to Galerie EIGEN+ART.
Image: Neo Rauch, Die Eselpfleger, 2013. Felt-tip pen and oil on paper, 8 1/4 x 11 5/8 inches. Courtesy the artist, Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin and David Zwirner © Neo Rauch, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
As If
Alternative Histories from Then to Now
The works in multiple mediums in As If: Alternative Histories from Then to Now offer examples of how we might reimagine historical narratives in order to contend with the traumas of contemporary life. These works of consummate draftsmanship exemplify the skill of drawing and the imagination of artists at work turning fantasies into plausible realities—absurd, amusing, and sometimes terrifying. Whether exacerbating the contradictions of present society or imagining genuinely alternative utopias, the participating authors and artists traverse science fiction, popular culture, and genuine aesthetic thought-experiments. Spanning a historical era transformed by war, racial and economic inequity, authoritarianism, and the persistent fear of imminent apocalypse, these works offer alternative understandings of our present by rewiring the past.
History is always up for grabs. For centuries, writers, philosophers, and artists have speculated about historical narratives that run counter to actual historical events. What if, in 1859, John Brown's successful raid on Harpers Ferry led to the establishment of a socialist nation called Nova Africa? What if, a few years later, in 1865, Susan B. Anthony became a gun-toting outlaw? A British General Strike in 1926 was a triumph? The Axis powers won World War II? Dewey defeated Truman? Raccoons or mosquitos evolved into the earth's dominant species? Working towards utopian, reactionary, or simply ambiguous ends, the artists, writers, and amateur science fiction enthusiasts in this exhibition use the playground of history as a foundation on which to construct alternatives to the stark realities of the present—whether amplifying its inherent contradictions or imagining a better world.
Presented in As If: Alternative Histories from Then to Now are early speculative fiction publications from the mid 20th century, including the British wartime fanzine Futurian War Digest and ongoing science fiction magazine Interzone (1982–present), on loan from the Special Collections of the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Book covers for Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Philip K. Dick's The Man in High Castle, Norman Spinrad's Iron Dream, Martin Cruz Smith's The Indians Won, and Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee are accompanied by album covers from the discography of Sun Ra and prints of Jack Kirby's Lord of Light series, as well as the original ink drawing for the cover of Avengers #87, featuring Marvel's T'Challa, the Black Panther, illustrated by John Buscema. These items are complemented by contemporary works on paper by artists including Huma Bhabha, Joe Bradley, Vivian Caccuri, Keith Mayerson, and Cauleen Smith.
Organized by Giampaolo Bianconi, guest curator, and Isabella Kapur, Curatorial Assistant, The Drawing Center.
As If: Alternative Histories from Then to Now is made possible by Anonymous, with additional support from the Director's Circle of The Drawing Center. Special thanks to Joel Wachs.
Image: J. Michael Rosenblum, ed., Futurian War Digest Vol. 1 no. 7, 1941. Published by J. Michael Rosenblum, Leeds, United Kingdom. Cover artwork by Harry Turner. Fanzine. Albin O. Kuhn Library, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Terry Winters
Facts and Fictions
Terry Winters: Facts and Fictions was on view at The University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass Amherst from January 31 - April 28, 2019. The Drawing Center's Terry Winters: Facts and Fictions was on view April 6–August 12, 2018 in our Main Gallery.
PRESS Read about Terry Winters: Facts and Fictions via Artforum
A leading figure in the art world for four decades, Terry Winters became well known in the 1980s for his materially-conscious drawings and paintings. Representing the patterns and schema that undergird physical and intellectual life—French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is cited as an important reference—Winters's drawings of grids, networks, and knots illustrate complex encounters between biological drives, technological systems, and mental processes. The Drawing Center's Main Gallery presents an overview of Winters's drawings from 1980 to the present including full cycles of drawings as well as a selection of large-scale works on paper that foreground the overarching theme of Winters's practice: the desire to make sense, however fictively, of the manner in which the visible world is constructed and received. Rather than offering a comprehensive drawing retrospective, the show is organized with an eye to morphological relationships so that, as viewers move through the gallery, they recall and ideally return to earlier related images.
Organized by Claire Gilman, Chief Curator.
Terry Winters: Facts and Fictions is made possible by Jack Shear; Agnes Gund; Kathy and Richard Fuld; The Ellsworth Kelly Foundation; Jane Dresner Sadaka and Ned Sadaka; Waqas Wajahat; and Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson.
Special thanks to Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.
Image: Terry Winters, 7-Fold Sequence, One, 2008. Graphite on paper, 29 1/2 x 41 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Image © Terry Winters, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.
Read Drawing Papers 135: Terry Winters: Facts and Fictions
Buy the catalogue.
Susan York
For the second long-term installation presented in the Lab Corridor, The Drawing Center presents a site-specific installation by the Santa Fe-based artist Susan York, which references the internal structure of the museum's 35 Wooster Street building. Using graphite as a sculptural rather than a two-dimensional medium, York created replicas of parts of the museum's foundation: irregular granite piers that protrude above the museum's ground floor. Four graphite drawings, each mirroring the appearance of a pier, hang alongside York's sculptural works, strengthening the ties between drawing and sculpture in her practice. York's long-term installation initiates an expanded field of activity at The Drawing Center, offering an opportunity to explore drawing as an interactive and socially-minded practice. By bringing attention to The Drawing Center's building, York's installation encourages discussion about the importance of museums as public spaces with historical and physical presence.
Organized by Amber Harper, Assistant Curator.
Susan York: Foundation is made possible by the support of Andrew Wallerstein and Mary Sloane; Diane Karp, P.h.D; James Kelly; and an anonymous donor.
Special thanks to Exhibitions 2d – Marfa.
Image: Susan York, Installation view of Foundation, The Drawing Center, 2017–18.
Open Sessions 14
Spirit Level
Join us for the Opening Reception on Thursday, February 21, 6-8pm. No RSVP necessary. Concurrently that evening you can view Winter Term 2019: The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) for its Opening Reception.
Spirit Level: Open Sessions 14 will explore materials that bear witness to suspended states common to "waiting" in relationship to the practice of drawing. The exhibition gathers components that characterize the waiting room—of a doctor's office, the Department of Motor Vehicle, or a bus depot, for example—where strangers assemble in varying degrees of temporary stasis. The waiting room at The Drawing Center will serve as a space for drawing and rituals that will guide visitors through a variety of life's transitions. The visible elements in the exhibition are a stage for a performance or an activity in the making. Here the collective voice of Open Sessions' artists sets in motion an absurd play, incorporating the behaviors (norms and otherwise) of waiting in a designated space. Diagrams, charts, blueprints, drawings, videos, and schematics will explore the passage from one place to another; the transformation of line to form; and the metaphysical shift to some place unknown. This exhibition features the work of Mike Crane, Kunlin He, Victoria Keddie, Lux Lindner, Sharon Madanes, and Guadalupe Maravilla.
From October 12 through December 2019, Open Sessions presents five exhibitions organized by Rosario Güiraldes and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions Curators, together with participating artists. Conceived and organized over fourteen months, The Lab or the Drawing Room exhibitions present experimental work and ideas, and take the form of thematic group shows. In the second year of the cycle, Open Sessions curators organize a full-museum exhibition to which all Open Sessions artists contribute work that best manifests and/or expands what drawing is.
Mike Crane is an artist based in New York. His work has been exhibited at Documenta 14, Kassel; Haus der Kulturen der Welt and The Berlinale Forum Expanded, both Berlin; Orgy Park and The Bronx Museum, both New York; and the Center for Contemporary Art, Derry, Northern Ireland. Crane was an artist in residence at Banff Center, Alberta, Canada; Rupert Centre Vilnius, Lithuania; MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire; Smack Mellon and Triangle Arts Association, both New York.
Kunlin He is an artist who lives and works in San Francisco, California. His art explores contemporary visual culture and the methodology of Chinese studies and Sinophone studies in performance, essay, film, painting, and installation. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2018 and has been selected as a finalist for the 2019 SFMoMA SECA Award.
Victoria Keddie is an artist working within the cross-disciplines of sound, video, installation, and performance. Keddie has devoted her work and research to an expanded use of media with a particular focus on broadcasting and the use of electromagnetic energies. She lives and works in New York City.
Lux Lindner is a visual artist and performer living in Buenos Aires. His artwork often deals with themes of memory, national identity, and a doomed technological sublime.
Sharon Madanes lives and works in New York. Her current art practice focuses on the rituals, aesthetics, and ethics of medicine, as contextualized within the banal and institutional surroundings in which doctors treat patients, and in which patients wait. Sharon completed her MFA at Hunter College and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2014. She is currently completing a medical degree at Columbia University.
Guadalupe Maravilla (formally Irvin Morazan) was part of the first wave of undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s from Central America. In his multidisciplinary work, he creates and choreographs fictionalized rituals that incorporate his pre-colonial ancestry, fiction, and autobiography. His drawings, performances, and videos portray the "undocumented" as the protagonist of his work. His art often addresses a hybrid of border politics and fictional practices and creates new visual memories for the entangled genealogy of the border crossing stories.
Open Sessions Artists 2018–20:
Joeun Aatchim, Kenseth Armstead, Bahar Behbahani, Keren Benenisty, Katarina Burin, Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Alex Callender, Crystal Z Campbell, Ludovica Carbotta, Jesse Chun, Liz Collins, Mike Crane, Dennis RedMoon Darkeem, Theodore Darst, Billy and Steven Dufala, Joanthan Ehrenberg, Carolina Fusilier, Rachel Granofsky, LaMont Hamilton, Kunlin He, Victoria Keddie, Young Joo Lee, Lux Linder, Sharon Madanes, Guadalupe Maravilla, Zatara McIntyre, Ester Partegàs, Omid Shekari, Tariku Shiferaw, Johanna Unzueta, Cosmo Whyte
Open Sessions is made possible by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Evelyn Toll Family Foundation, and, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Image: Sharon Madanes, Natural Light Humanizes, 2017. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 54 x 60 inches.
Winter Term 2019
The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)
To prepare for Winter Term 2019, please read this interview with The Center for Urban Pedagogy's Executive Director Christine Gaspar via Design Feast.
Winter Term is an annual initiative in which The Drawing Center partners with an artist or organization whose mission it is to explore the transformative role that drawing can play in civic and global society. The second session engages The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), a Brooklyn-based organization that leverages graphic design and illustration to bring transparency to complex civic structures (e.g., land use, labor rights, immigration rights, juvenile detention) in partnership with the communities impacted by them. The typical end product—multi-language posters, pocket-sized booklets, and hands-on toolkits—ensures ease of access and dissemination to those constituencies who need them most: immigrants, street vendors, and public housing residents, among others.
CUP's residency at The Drawing Center documents the organization's process by following one project from CUP's 2018–19 season: "Immigrants & NY," a guide explaining civil rights and protections for immigrants at risk of deportation (Designer: Luiza Dale; Community Partner: The New York Immigration Coalition). The residency features an exhibition in which the project is broken down visually from its conception through its design, testing, and distribution. There will also be a series of events geared towards individuals wishing to learn more about community-engaged design, as well as an on-site store where individuals can browse and purchase past and current posters from CUP's Making Policy Public program.
Organized by Claire Gilman, Chief Curator; Rosario Guiraldes, Assistant Curator and Open Sessions Curator; and Peter Ahlberg, Exhibition Designer
As part of the exhibition, the Center for Urban Pedagogy will offer a series of public programs for adults and youth that share the organization's unique methodology. Programs include an opportunity to meet CUP's latest collaborators at the 2019 Making Policy Public + Public Access Design Launch Party, a panel discussion about using illustration to represent diverse communities, and interactive workshops using CUP's What Is Zoning? and Sewer in a Suitcase toolkits.
Thursday, February 21, 6–8pm, All are welcome, no RSVP needed
Opening reception
Monday, February 25, 6:30–8pm, $5 via Eventbrite here
Using Illustration to Represent Diverse Communities
Panel discussion on representation in illustration with Lizania Cruz, Njoki Gitahi, and Erin Rommel, see bios via Eventbrite link above
Moderated by Christine Gaspar (Executive Director, CUP)
How can illustration be used as a tool to represent diverse communities? How can designers use their work to combat bias and disrupt common stereotypes? Designers, artists, and illustrators will discuss their experiences working with community-based organizations and CUP on "popular education materials," or tools that use visuals and accessible text to make complex issues easy to understand. Hear about lessons learned and how these artists were able to create visual tools that were culturally sensitive and responsive to the communities they were partnering with, and what they learned along the way.
Thursday, February 28, 3–6pm [Repeats on Thursday, March 7], $5 via Eventbrite here
Designing with Communities
Methodology workshop for adults with Christine Gaspar (Executive Director, CUP) and CUP staff
This interactive workshop will introduce participants to CUP's unique and award-winning community-engaged design methodology. How can you use design and art to help contribute to real community change? How can you build a partnership with a community you are not a part of? Attendees will learn from CUP's Executive Director Christine Gaspar and other staff about how CUP facilitates its projects with community-based organizations and designers, helping to bridge their worlds to create visually-based explanations of complex policies and processes.
Saturday, March 2, 11am-1pm [Repeats on Saturday, March 9] $5 via Eventbrite here
What is Zoning?
Workshop for adults with CUP Community Education Program staff
Zoning law regulates land use across the city and shapes buildings, blocks, and whole neighborhoods. How does it work? Why is it so controversial? This interactive workshop helps explain the zoning of density, bulk, land use, and how proposed rezonings could affect your neighborhood. Learn the basics (or build up to topics like inclusionary and contextual zoning) while maxing out your lot with plastic block buildings or laying out a brand new city.
Thursday, March 7, 3–6pm SOLD OUT, sign up for waitlist via Eventbrite here
Designing with Communities
Methodology workshop for adults with Christine Gaspar (Executive Director, CUP) and CUP staff
This interactive workshop will introduce participants to CUP's unique and award-winning community-engaged design methodology. How can you use design and art to help contribute to real community change? How can you build a partnership with a community you are not a part of? Attendees will learn from CUP's Executive Director Christine Gaspar and other staff about how CUP facilitates its projects with community-based organizations and designers, helping to bridge their worlds to create visually-based explanations of complex policies and processes.
Saturday, March 9, 11am–1pm $5 via Eventbrite here
What is Zoning?
Workshop for adults with CUP Community Education Program staff.
Zoning law regulates land use across the city and shapes buildings, blocks, and whole neighborhoods. How does it work? Why is it so controversial? This interactive workshop helps explain the zoning of density, bulk, land use, and how proposed rezonings could affect your neighborhood. Learn the basics (or build up to topics like inclusionary and contextual zoning) while maxing out your lot with plastic block buildings or laying out a brand new city.
Saturday, March 16, 11am–1pm $5 via Eventbrite here
Sewer in a Suitcase
Workshop for kids with a CUP Youth Education Program Manager.
New York City uses over one billion gallons of water every day. What happens to it after we've used it? Sewer in a Suitcase is a working model of New York City's sewer system that helps demystify the hidden workings of the City's water infrastructure by following the journey water takes beyond the drain. The workshop, suitable for all ages, demonstrates our sewer system in action, and introduces concepts like urban watersheds, water infrastructure, and the health impacts of water pollution.
Winter Term 2019: The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is made possible by Fiona and Eric Rudin, Lisa Silver and Jean-Christophe Castelli, Wagner Foundation, and Isabel Stainow Wilcox.
Image: ©the Center for Urban Pedagogy, 2018. Distribution event for Making Policy Public publication, Rent Regulation Rights, March 9, 2014, Sara D. Roosevelt Park, Chinatown, New York City. This project is a collaboration of designers Intracollaborative, community organization CAAAV, and CUP. This MPP helps rent-stabilized tenants in Chinatown and the Lower East Side to understand their rights, fight landlord harassment, and collectively organize to stay in their homes.
For Opacity
Elijah Burgher, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Nathaniel Mary Quinn
"Complex and colorful drawings by Toyin Ojih Odutola, Nathaniel Mary Quinn and Elijah Burgher make for an unusually rich show in "For Opacity,"" -Read full The New York Times review by Will Heinrich here (scroll down)
This fall, The Drawing Center presents an exhibition that focuses on three young artists—Elijah Burgher, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Nathaniel Mary Quinn—who explore diverse identities through portraiture and who do so almost exclusively through the medium of drawing. These artists have entirely distinct stylistic approaches and personal backgrounds but they are connected by the way in which they use drawing to investigate subjecthood as well as its resistance to depiction. Indeed, Burgher, Ojih Odutola, and Quinn embrace drawing because it invests surface with the felt intimacy of touch while nonetheless confirming it to be a malleable and uncertain construct. Ultimately, in the intellectual tradition of French theorist Édouard Glissant, these artists believe that the right to refuse explanation is as integral to the formulation of selfhood as is revelation.
For Opacity: Elijah Burgher, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Nathaniel Mary Quinn is the first museum exhibition to concentrate on the work of Burgher and Quinn and follows on the heels of Ojih Odutola's successful 2017 New York debut at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In the case of each artist, older drawings will be placed alongside work created expressly for The Drawing Center exhibition to foreground the artists' sustained and developing dedication to their fields of inquiry. At the same time, the artists' works will be interspersed throughout the exhibition space to allow for dialogue and cross-connections. Whether using a highly refined illusionistic approach (Burgher), a broad range of material techniques and media (Ojih Odutola), or a fractured, composite aesthetic (Quinn) the artists in For Opacity explore the relationship between insight and obscurity; what a surface can reveal and what it necessarily withholds.
Organized by Claire Gilman, Chief Curator, with Amber Harper, Assistant Curator.
For Opacity: Elijah Burgher, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Nathaniel Mary Quinn is made possible by Almine Rech Gallery; Burger Collection, Hong Kong; Anderson Cooper; Fairfax Dorn and Marc Glimcher; Stephanie and Timothy Ingrassia; Jack Shainman Gallery; Kathleen Madden and Paul Frantz; Richard Gerrig and Timothy Peterson; Noel E. D. Kirnon; Thomas Lavin; Fiona and Eric Rudin; Beth Rudin DeWoody and Firooz Zahedi; Salon 94; Neil Tennant; Dr. Daniel S. Berger and Scott Wenthe; Rashid Johnson; M+B; P•P•O•W; Rhona Hoffman Gallery; Half Gallery; and Western Exhibitions.
Image: Toyin Ojih Odutola, Paris Apartment, 2016–17. Charcoal, pastel, and pencil on paper, 59 3/8 x 42 inches. Courtesy of The Dean Collection. © Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Read Drawing Papers 138: For Opacity
Buy the catalogue.
Jennifer Wynne Reeves
All Right for Now
"Ms. Reeves's own foundations, built on art and virtual community, have proved, even posthumously, to be extraordinarily sound. "" -Read full The New York Times review by Martha Schwendener here (scroll down)
Jennifer Wynne Reeves: All Right for Now opened in the Drawing Room on October 12. From the late 1990s until her too-early death from brain cancer in 2014, Jennifer Wynne Reeves (b. 1963, Royal Oak, MI) developed a reputation as an artist's artist, garnering an intense and loyal following especially among fellow artists who appreciated her ability to load errant scribbles and globs of crusty paint with humor, narrativity, and poignant emotional affect. Her first museum show in New York, The Drawing Center exhibition is a long overdue consideration of Reeves's unique contribution to the dialogue between representation and abstraction that has preoccupied recent art. Featuring works on paper, Masonite, and wood, as well as notebooks and text pieces (Reeves wrote copiously and had a large fan base on Facebook), the exhibition examines the power of line and color to render accessible deeply personal fears and desires.
Organized by Claire Gilman, Chief Curator, with Rosario Guiraldes, Assistant Curator.
Jennifer Wynne Reeves: All Right for Now is made possible by the Jennifer Wynne Reeves Trust; Isabella Hutchinson and Diego Gradowczyk; the Toby Devan Lewis Donor Advised Fund of the Jewish Federation of Cleveland; Fiona and Eric Rudin; Beth Rudin DeWoody and Firooz Zahedi; David Steinhardt; Lee and Louis Reeves; Blick Art Materials, LLC; FM Brush Company; Steve Shane; Dan Lebson and Tom Wilinsky; David Reed; Bernadette Ward and Ladd Forsline, Colorfin; Elena and Holden Stein; and anonymous donors.
Image: Jennifer Wynne Reeves, Bittersweet, 2005. Gouache on paper, 11 x 14 inches. Courtesy of BravinLee Programs.
Read Drawing Papers 139: All Right for Now
Buy the catalogue.
Open Sessions 13
Core Sample
A clear line meanders through space, losing speed and direction until it shifts shape, becoming a cloud on a page. Core Sample: Open Sessions 13 explores drawn marks as a way to locate place on a sheet of paper or to suggest the expanse of geospatial time travel. Symbolic gestures borrowed from mythic worlds alongside references to the everyday offer insight into the artists' varied traditions, identities, and cultures. Core Sample: Open Sessions 13 features the work of Alex Callender, Liz Collins, Dennis RedMoon Darkeem, Zatara McIntyre, Johanna Unzueta, and Cosmo Whyte.
Core Sample is one of five exhibitions presented in The Lab between October 2018 and December 2019 as part of the third cycle of The Drawing Centers Open Sessions program. These thematic group shows are conceived and organized by Rosario Güiraldes and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions Curators, together with participating artists. In the second year of the program cycle, Open Sessions Curators also organize a full-museum exhibition to which all Open Sessions artists contribute work that best manifests and/or expands the meaning and relevance of drawing today.
Alex Callender lives and works in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her studio practice explores the intersections of myth, identity, and material culture. Through the visual forms of historical narrative, speculative fiction, and repurposed colonial imagery, Callender considers issues of gender, hybridity, and environmental instability. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally, and has completed studio-based residencies with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Vermont Studio Center, Urban Glass, DRAWinternational, and the BAU Institute in France.
Liz Collins lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Collins is known for her diverse work in textiles and has, for over two decades, moved fluidly between fields and formats including fashion, craft, performance, and design. Collins' multimedia installations and textile works have been featured in museums and galleries nationally and internationally, including the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York; as well as group exhibitions at ICA/Boston, the FIT Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, MoMA, and the New Museum.
Dennis RedMoon Darkeem is a multimedia artist based in the South Bronx, New York, who creates work based on the familiar objects that he sees in his daily travels, discovering elements in architecture and among everyday items found within the home. Darkeem ultimately sets out to express a meaningful story about events in his own life as well as in the lives of others in the communities in which he works. His multimedia works allow for great versatility and a rich viewer experience as the eye uncovers the multiple layers.
Zatara McIntyre lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. McIntyre's art on paper originates from an impulse to examine the ways in which hybridity and culture manifest through black womanhood. She often utilizes contradictory symbols of deified mythological figures to subvert patriarchal systems of power. Her recent artworks examine the extent to which evocations of female power can perform in an imagined space. She recently attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture after earning an MFA at Hunter College.
Johanna Unzueta lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her drawing practice in fiber and natural materials often references biological observations of life, plants and the sciences, textiles and architecture, trace, and vibrational fields that are more metaphysical than material.
Cosmo Whyte is a multi-disciplinary artist who employs drawing, performance, and sculpture to create conceptual work that explores how notions of identity are disrupted by migration. The Atlanta-based, Jamaican-born artist has shown extensively in the United States and internationally. Recognitions include the Forward Art emerging artist of the year award, the International Sculpture Center's Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, Artadia Award, and MOCA GA Working Artist Project award.
Open Sessions is organized by Rosario Güiraldes and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions Curators.
Open Sessions artists 2018–2020:
Joeun Aatchim; Kenseth Armstead; Bahar Behbahani; Keren Benbenisty; Katarina Burin; Esteban Cabeza de Baca; Alexis Callender; Crystal Z Campbell; Ludovica Carbotta; Jesse Chun; Liz Collins; Mike Crane; Dennis Darkeem; Theodore Darst; Billy and Steven Dufala; Jonathan Ehrenberg; Carolina Fusilier; Rachel Granofsky; LaMont Hamilton; Kunlin He; Victoria Keddie; Young Joo Lee; Lux Lindner; Sharon Madanes; Guadalupe Maravilla; Zatara McIntyre; Ester Partegas; Omid Shekari; Tariku Shiferaw; Johanna Unzueta; Cosmo Whyte.
Open Sessions is made possible by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Evelyn Toll Family Foundation, and, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Image: Zatara McIntyre, Untitled, (detail), 2018. Pastel, oil stick, and acrylic on paper, 30 x 23 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Open Sessions 12
a … is alter(ed)
a…is alter(ed): Open Sessions 12 explores the imaginative determination of "drawing" and "line" by relating it to a development process, social artifacts, psychological trace, and prosthetic memory—journals, maps, technology, and calendars. The poetics of flow between known and unknown is a feedback murmur that leads to clarity when engaging the object. a..is alter(ed) features Joeun Aatchim, Kenseth Armstead, Ludovica Carbotta, Billy and Steven Dufala, LaMont Hamilton, and Ester Partegàs.
For a…is alter(ed), experimental and traditional approaches to drawing are taken as a mode of inquiry, to produce the unexpected through ventriloquism (Aatchim); tell the story of a slave-turned-spy in the American Revolution (Armstead); upend notions of scale by drawing with an excavator shovel (Dufala Brothers); recover the role of imagination by projecting fictional narratives onto objects (Carbotta); welcome the blind and visually impaired into the space through braille-large-scale poems (Hamilton); and to disseminate advertisement-flyer-like drawings across The Lab and the neighborhood (Partegàs).
From October 12 until December 2019 in The Lab, Open Sessions presents five exhibitions organized by Rosario Güiraldes and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions Curators, together with participating artists. Conceived and organized over fourteen months, The Lab exhibitions present experimental work and ideas, and take the form of thematic group shows. In the second year of the cycle, Open Sessions curators organize a full-museum exhibition to which all Open Sessions artists contribute work that best manifests and/or expands what drawing is.
Joeun Aatchim lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work has been shown at the Jewish Museum and SPRING/BREAK Art Show, both New York; the Long March Space, Beijing; and the SBC Gallery of Contemporary Arts, Montréal.
Kenseth Armstead lives and works in Brooklyn. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Brooklyn Museum; Studio Museum in Harlem; and Socrates Sculpture Park, all New York; and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston. His works are included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Newark Museum, New Jersey; African American Museum, Dallas; and numerous public and private collections.
Ludovica Carbotta lives and works in Spain. Her work has been exhibited at the Kunstlerhaus Museum, Vienna; MAXXI Museum, Rome; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; Galleria Arte Moderna, both Turin; Marta Cervera Gallery, Madrid; and ON Public, Bologna.
Steven and Billy Dufala live and work in Philadelphia. Their work is represented by Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia.
LaMont Hamilton lives and works in New York. His work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art; The Kitchen; Issue Project Room; and the Studio Museum, all New York.
Ester Partegàs lives and works in New York. Her work has been shown at El Paso Museum of Art/Museo de Arte Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; Museum of the City, New York; and MACBA, Barcelona.
Open Sessions is organized by Rosario Güiraldes and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions Curators.
Open Sessions artists 2018–20:
Joeun Aatchim; Kenseth Armstead; Bahar Behbahani; Keren Benbenisty; Katarina Burin; Esteban Cabeza de Baca; Alexis Callender; Crystal Z Campbell; Ludovica Carbotta; Jesse Chun; Liz Collins; Mike Crane; Dennis Darkeem; Theodore Darst; Billy and Steven Dufala; Jonathan Ehrenberg; Carolina Fusilier; Rachel Granofsky; LaMont Hamilton; Kunlin He; Victoria Keddie; Young Joo Lee; Lux Lindner; Sharon Madanes; Guadalupe Maravilla; Zatara McIntyre; Ester Partegas; Omid Shekari; Tariku Shiferaw; Johanna Unzueta; Cosmo Whyte.
Open Sessions is made possible by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Evelyn Toll Family Foundation, and, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Image: Dufala Brothers, Tic Tac Toe, 2015. Video, 22:05 minutes. Image courtesy of the artists and Fleisher Ollman Gallery
Ellen Berkenblit
Lines Roar
On view: April 26 – June 10 | June 27 – August 12, 2018
Watch the Ellen Berkenblit: Lines Roar trailer here
Ellen Berkenblit's first film Lines Roar (2018) presents a look into her process. Concentrating on the explosive nature of Berkenblit's line, the film features familiar motifs from her paintings and drawings: a long-nosed female, a tiger, a stiletto. Lines Roar intermingles autobiographical footage taken by Berkenblit in both her home and studio. Also interlaced throughout the film are photographs of Berkenblit's family and images taken by her father, who was an amateur photographer and chemist. The result is a film that combines Berkenblit's life with her work, an intimate look at what drives the artist's practice.
Organized by Brett Littman, Executive Director.
Lines Roar was created by Ellen Berkenblit in collaboration with directors Mónica Brand and Francisco Lopez of Mogollon. The score of the film features music by Zeena Parkins. This film was commissioned by The Drawing Center and co-produced by Anton Kern Gallery.
Ellen Berkenblit: Lines Roar is made possible by Rhiannon Kubicka.
Special thanks to Anton Kern Gallery.
Image: Ellen Berkenblit, Film still from Lines Roar, 2018. Color, 12:21 min. A film by Ellen Berkenblit in collaboration with directors Mónica Brand and Francisco Lopez. Original Score by Zeena Parkins; Zeena Parkins: Harps/Electronics/Tuning Forks; Ikue Mori: Electronics.
Praised for their meticulously-detailed panoramic landscapes, Anglo-French artists Alpha and Chris Mason, known collectively as Hipkiss, have been collaborating for three decades on intricate drawings that interweave dystopian narratives with a personal lexicon of symbolic forms. Past works by Hipkiss chronicle fictional histories of warring clans, urban crusades, and quasi-apocalyptical societies. For Bulwark, the artists' first solo museum show in New York, Hipkiss presents the most recent cycle of drawings in their series The Towers (2015–ongoing). The drawings pull from the myriad allegorical significance of towers as symbols for transcendence, irrational ambition, and piety.
Organized by Brett Littman, Executive Director.
Hipkiss: Bulwark is made possible by Fiona and Eric Rudin, an anonymous donor, and Selig Sacks.
Hipkiss, From left: Bulwark #2, #3, #6, #8, and #9 from The Towers, 2017. Graphite, silver ink, silver tape, and metal leaf on Fabriano 4 paper, 89 x 16 inches, each. Courtesy of the artists.
Read Drawing Papers 136: Hipkiss: Bulwark
Buy the catalogue.
Eduardo Navarro
Into Ourselves
The Drawing Center has commissioned Into Ourselves, a new short-term project by Argentinian artist Eduardo Navarro for The Lab which will open on April 6, 2018. Navarro has produced a new series of edible drawings, inspired by quantum physics––specifically the "holographic principle," which describes how information in the universe can only be scrambled but never destroyed.
The drawings are be placed on shelves with red "heat lamps." During the course of the exhibition, a soup will be made that will dissolve the drawings to make them digestible. Into Ourselves also explores the idea of shifting our understanding of aesthetic primacy away from the eye and the world of ideas to metabolism, and the stomach.
Organized by Rosario Güiraldes, Assistant Curator and Brett Littman, Executive Director.
Into Ourselves has been jointly developed by The Drawing Center and Der Tank. It was shown for the first time in November 2017 at Der Tank, and has been produced thanks to the support of Galeria Nara Roesler, LLC. and the Consulate General of Argentina in New York.
Image: Eduardo Navarro, Into Ourselves, 2017. A4 drawing on edible paper with edible ink.
Winter Term
Torkwase Dyson and the Wynter-Wells Drawing School for Environmental Justice
PRESS "While the artist's own work encompasses painting and sculpture, Dyson has long treated drawing as a foundational medium. For her, it functions as a sort of micro-action, suitable for understanding problems that are so massive, systemic, intractable, and global as to exceed our conception—what the philosopher Timothy Morton, a figure who plays a central role in her thinking, calls "hyperobjects." Our current environmental crisis is foremost among these, as is anti-blackness—the two intertwined issues to which the Wynter-Wells project is addressed." -via 4 Columns, click here for the full article.
Special hours => For this project we are open every day 12-6pm | Thurdays 12-8pm
The Drawing Center is pleased to announce Winter Term, a new annual initiative in which the museum will partner with an artist or organization whose mission it is to explore the transformative role that drawing can play in civic and global society. The yearly program, which will consist of public events, classes, and performances, as well as an exhibition, will build a community of people to investigate the efficacy of drawing as a tool for addressing inequity and encouraging social change. In a world ever more in need of human connection and compassion, Winter Term will ask how drawing, the most universal medium, might extend beyond the gallery space to provide concrete tools for collective engagement and collaboration. In this way, Winter Term provides a new model for exhibition making, as well as for the role that art institutions can play in the real world.
For the first session, which will take place from February 24 through March 11, 2018, The Drawing Center has invited artist Torkwase Dyson to create an installation and organize a two-week series of classes, discussions, and formal experiments developed from her incipient project the Wynter-Wells Drawing School for Environmental Justice—named for Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter and American Civil Rights leader Ida B. Wells. The School will present an experimental curriculum employing techniques culled from the visual arts as well as design theories of geography, infrastructure, engineering, and architecture to initiate dialogue about geography and spatiality in an era of global crisis due to human-induced climate change. Participation in each class will be by application only (the afternoon sessions will be open to observation by the public). Drawings and sculptures by Dyson will be on view throughout the program's run and Dyson will present during select "office hours" to discuss her work and the school with the public.
During an open studio-style installation, Dyson will explicate her own formal concept of "Black Compositional Thought" while terms such as improvisation, nomadicity, and re-orientation will be applied to techniques within abstract drawing that confront issues of environmental justice and the path towards a more equitable future. Confirmed invited guests include architect and author Mario Gooden; curator Rujeko Hockley; artist and designer Ekene Ijeoma; designer, artist, and urbanist Ron Morrison; professor and author Christina Sharpe; and architect and author Mabel O. Wilson. In addition, artist Andres Luis Hernandez will create a drawing score to which artist Zachary Fabri will respond in movement. The result of their collaboration will be documented in drawings and photography.
Organized by Claire Gilman, Chief Curator
Class Schedule
Tue, Feb 27; Fri, Mar 2; and Wed, Mar 7. Scroll down for details
Times for all classes: 10am-3pm with a break between Noon-1pm
10am to Noon - open to participants only
1pm to 3pm - open to participants and the public to observe
On View:
Drawings and sculptures by Dyson will be on view in the Main Gallery and Drawing Room. In addition, there will be books from Dyson's library for perusal, as well as articles and reference material related to the issues under discussion.
Saturday, February 24
Torkwase Dyson will hold office hours from 12:00pm to 4:00pm in the Main Gallery. Additional office hours will be held on the following dates: Sunday, February 25; Thursday, March 1; Saturday, March 3; and Sunday, March 4.
Saturday, February 24 at 6pm
RSVP via eventbrite here
Christina Sharpe joins Dyson to discuss their collaborative project Ocular (A Work of Process) and what it means to make work with the purpose of revisitation. Drawing upon black spatial experiences informed by the transatlantic slave trade and global warming, Dyson created the film installation The Holds Multiply in response to Sharpe's 2016 book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016).
Tuesday, February 27
10am to Noon OPEN TO PARTICIPANTS ONLY
1pm to 3pm OPEN TO THE PUBLIC WITH ADMISSION
Class 1: Global Warming, Uneven Development and New Geographies: What is Global Warming? What is Climate Change? How are they different and what do they have to do with uneven development and geography? This class will address these questions through drawing as it relates to time, motion, and transparency.
Thursday, March 1 at 6pm
RSVP via eventbrite here
Panel discussion on North African nomadic architecture and other models of self-emancipation through architecture and design. With Ekene Ijeoma, Ron Morrison, and Mabel O. Wilson. Moderated by Rujeko Hockley.
Friday, March 2
10am to Noon OPEN TO PARTICIPANTS ONLY
1pm to 3pm OPEN TO THE PUBLIC WITH ADMISSION
This class is co-taught by architect and author Mario Gooden.
Class 2: Architecture and Liquidity: What types of energy are available to us and why should we diversify and use less? This class will investigate diverse sources of energy and their site-specific pros and cons. As a drawing project, it will consider hydroelectric power and gravitational potential energy as a way to examine state changes in matter and liquid. In addition, it will use the fundamental logic of elevation drawing to think through the science of water and the way in which it shapes space.
Wednesday, March 7
10am to Noon OPEN TO PARTICIPANTS ONLY
1pm to 3pm OPEN TO THE PUBLIC WITH ADMISSION
This class is co-taught by Andres Luis Hernandez.
Class 3: Nomadicity, Movement, and Improvisation: At a time when mass migration due to the effects of climate change is a critical question, artist and designer Andres L. Hernandez will guide the class through drawing as an interpretative act of movement. Dyson will hold a post activity discussion about nomadicity, movement, and improvisation inspired by the topic of self-emancipation through nomadic architecture, particularly that of North Africa. At the end of the day, the class will respond by exploring the notion of the perfect curve while listening to a playlist created by DJ Jet Toomer.
Friday, March 9, 6pm to 8pm
Closing reception
Winter Term 2018: Torkwase Dyson and the Wynter-Wells Drawing School for Environmental Justice is made possible by Lisa Silver and Jean-Christophe Castelli, and Isabel Stainow Wilcox.
Gary Simmons
Ghost Reels
As part of its on-going stairwell project, The Drawing Center has commissioned American artist Gary Simmons to create a site-specific wall drawing in the lobby stairwell. Simmons' installation will be the second in the series following Abdelkader Benchamma's Representation of Dark Matter (April 2015–August 2016).
Mining the iconography of American popular culture, Gary Simmons's work addresses personal and collective experiences of race and class. He is best known for his "erasure drawings," which he began working on in the late 1980s in an abandoned school in New York City that contained an abundance of blackboards. Using white chalk on slate-painted panels or walls, Simmons blurred the drawings with his hands resulting in hazy but persistent images that evoke faded memories or classrooms at the end of the school day. For The Drawing Center, Simmons created a text-based work consisting of names of African American actors and actresses from the early days of silent film. The artist describes the installation, whose format recalls the scrolling of closing film credits frozen in mid-motion, as invoking "the memories of actors that have been blurred in the history of Hollywood film . . . a kind of silence in both voice and visibility."
Curated by Claire Gilman, Senior Curator
Gary Simmons: Ghost Reels is made possible by the support of Jeffrey A. Hirsch and Alyssa Fanelli.
Special thanks to Metro Pictures.
Image: Gary Simmons, Ghost Reels, 2016. Mixed media, Site-specific installation. Installation at The Drawing Center, New York, 2016. Photograph by Martin Parsekian.
Judith Bernstein
Cabinet of Horrors
PRESS "It's gratifying to see the art world finally catch up to her [Judith Bernstein]. Read Mickalene Thomas's interview with the artist in the accompanying catalogue and find out why she's been an unsung hero to generations of feminists."- via The New Yorker, click here for the full article.
Judith Bernstein: Cabinet of Horrors presents a new body of work by the artist, specifically commissioned by The Drawing Center. Focusing on work made since Donald J. Trump was elected president in November 2016, the exhibition includes approximately eighteen new drawings, four large-scale paper panel murals, a series of drawn "dollar bills", vintage piggy banks in a vitrine, and a free political campaign pin designed by Bernstein. A series of free political campaign pins designed by Bernstein are available at the museum entrance.
Bernstein began engaging with social issues in her work during the 1960s, creating anti-Vietnam drawings, monumental phalluses, and pieces consisting entirely of her own signature. The present series of drawings use Trump's own insult-driven, childlike syntax and language to distill Bernstein's anger, disgust, and disapproval of the current administration and its policies. Through her new series of drawings, Bernstein transforms her critique into powerful graphic and text-based works. Providing context for Bernstein's recent work, this exhibition opens with one of the artist's earliest political drawings from 1969, as well as, a selection of five "Word Drawings" from 1995, including: Liberty, Justice, Equality, Evil, and Fear.
Organized by Brett Littman, Executive Director.
Judith Bernstein: Cabinet of Horrors is made possible through the support of Valeria Napoleone XX; Corina Larkin and Nigel Dawn; and the Richman Family Foundation with additional contributions from Burger Collection, Hong Kong; Karma International, Zürich/Los Angeles; and an anonymous donor.
Special thanks to Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, for their support of the exhibition catalogue.
Funding of all public programs associated with this exhibition is provided by Valeria Napoleone XX.
Image: Judith Bernstein, Trump Genie, 2016. Acrylic on paper, 29 x 41 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Read Drawing Papers 133: Judith Bernstein: Cabinet of Horrors
Buy the catalogue.
Raha Raissnia
PRESS Read about Raha Raissnia: Alluvius via The New Yorker + via Artforum
Raha Raissnia: Alluvius, the first solo museum exhibition of work by the Iranian-American artist Raha Raissnia, will contextualize the artist's drawings as part of her broader consideration of photographic and filmic representation. Raissnia grew up in Tehran during the 1978–79 revolution, and she often accompanied her father, an amateur photographer, on trips to the city center to document mass protests against the shah. Mirroring this early experience in her current work, Raissnia surreptitiously continues to take portraits and photographs of everyday life as a course of habit. For The Drawing Center, Raissnia created the two series of densely-composed charcoal drawings on view—entitled Alluvius (2016) and Canto (2017)—by referencing images sourced from her personal archive of both original and found photographs and film, ranging from photographic slides of mosque architecture to iPhone films taken on walks through Manhattan and snapshots of friends, family, and strangers. Rather than create direct copies, Raissnia intuitively abstracts her sources, laboriously rephotographing and drawing each image, transferring it between paper and celluloid, until it becomes unrecognizable and its meaning unsettled. Raha Raissnia: Alluvius engages drawing as a way to revisit, question, and change the images we use to construct personal, cultural, and national identity.
Organized by Amber Harper, Assistant Curator
Raha Raissnia: Alluvius is made possible by r/e projects; Jill and Peter Kraus; Catherine Lagrange; MZR Gedenkstiftung (Karen and Robert Rom), Switzerland; The Kadre Family Collection; and Rhombus Press.
Special thanks to Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, and Ab/Anbar Gallery, Tehran.
Image: Raha Raissnia, Alluvius 12, 2016. Mixed media, 12 3/8 x 19 3/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.
Eddie Martinez
Studio Wall
PRESS "Martinez has been swapping in new works as the show goes along, upping the ante on drawing from life—this is drawing as living."- via The New Yorker, click here for the full article.
Eddie Martinez's drawing practice blends seamlessly with his daily life as the New York-based artist carries pen and paper with him on the subway, to the doctor's office, and to restaurants and lectures, among other work and leisure events. Stylistically evocative of mid-century abstraction, Martinez's drawings bring their own complexity, plugging a rotating cast of characters into raw, vigorously-drawn landscapes: cartoon ducks, oversized eyes, coiled snakes, and anthropomorphic blocks of color are among his itinerant motifs. In his Brooklyn studio, Martinez maintains a "drawing wall," wherein sketches ranging in size, shape, and material serve simultaneously as a source of inspiration and a data bank for the artist's incessant imaginative output. The Drawing Center's forthcoming exhibition Eddie Martinez: Studio Wall, will bring the drawing wall to the museum. The artist will paper the gallery with thousands of sketches that he will change throughout the exhibition's run. In addition, several large drawings and paintings will be hung on top of these sketches allowing viewers to observe the interconnection between all aspects of Martinez's practice.
Organized by Claire Gilman, Chief Curator.
Eddie Martinez: Studio Wall is made possible through the support of Beth DeWoody; Jeannie and T Grant; Barbara Toll; Bruce and Robbi Toll; Liz and Jonathan Goldman; Ian & Serge Krawiecki Gazes; Craig Nerenberg; Carole Server and Oliver Frankel; and Schuster Tanger.
Special thanks to Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London.
Image: Eddie Martinez, Untitled, 2015. Silkscreen ink, oil paint, spray paint and enamel on canvas, 72 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London.
Read Drawing Papers 134: Eddie Martinez: Studio Wall
Buy the catalogue.
What the Body Can Do
Open Sessions 11
PRESS " Two high points: Slinko, a Ukrainian artist based in New Jersey, whose ink storyboard drawings suggest a collaboration between Raw Comix and Thomas Piketty, and the exquisitely intricate watercolor-and-pen drawing "Princesses," by Jennifer May Reiland, a fairy tale unafraid to spill its guts."- via The New Yorker, click here for the full article.
What the Body Can Do: Open Sessions 11, the final exhibition of the program's 2016–17 cycle, captures the movement and potential of individual bodies in collective action. The artists in this exhibition dissect spectacles of war, memorialize immigrant and refugee narratives, savor protest cinema and images produced by the paparazzi. The exhibition features artists, Danielle Dean, Olalekan Jeyifous, Jennifer May Reiland, Slinko, and Hồng-An Trương. Dean's animations unravel speech; Jeyifous' images collapse surrealist aesthetics and the design troupe of architectural folly; telephone screens, mirrors, and the camera's eye are a window into Reiland's versions of biblical and mythological tales; bread figures embody uprising and rebellion in Slinko's large storyboard drawings; and Trương's photos compose an archive of fragmented views of the Asian American activist movement in the United States.
Open Sessions is a hybrid exhibition/residency program created by Lisa Sigal and Nova Benway, Open Sessions Curators. It provides unique opportunities for selected artists to find new approaches for contextualizing and exhibiting their work through exhibitions, public programs, workshops, and working dinners. The artists selected for Open Sessions may or may not draw as their primary means of art-making. The two-year program engages musicians, architects, dancers, poets—anyone who is interested in expanding the boundaries of drawing. Open Sessions artists work together to create a dynamic, continuous conversation, viewing drawing as an activity rather than a product.
Image: Slinko, Economy of Means, (detail), 2017, archival print, 44 x 68 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Jackie Ferrara
Jackie Ferrara: Lines consists of eight wall drawings, each anchored by imagined architecture or architectural elements along with lists of film titles rendered in Morse code. The Morse code acts as a foundation or band, interrupting the drawn architecture or adding another layer over the entire surface. The underlying theme of the individual drawings is reflected both in the architectural element or shape dominating the drawing as well as by the Morse code text, which consists of curated lists of films Ferrara began compiling in 1993 that reflect her life-long passion for film. Vampire Towers, for example, depicts nine abstract, dark towers that emerge out of a foundation of vampire film titles veiled in Morse code. This commission reflects the ongoing evolution of Ferrara's work, incorporating elements of the established language of her sculpture and public art works and bringing them to the walls of The Drawing Center.
Curated by Olga Valle Tetkowski, Exhibition Manager
Jackie Ferrara: Lines is made possible by The Drawing Center's Exhibition Fund members. Special thanks to Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz.
Photo: Installation View, Lab Corridor. 2016. Photo by Martin Parsekian.
Read Lines by Jackie Ferrara
The Stone at The Drawing Center: Music and Visuals
Organized by John Zorn
John Zorn founded The Stone, a project space for experimental music, in 2005. At its former location in the Lower East Side, the venue hosted more than 7,500 music performances, spanning genres from avant-jazz to contemporary classical. Before The Stone moves to its new Greenwich Village space at the New School for Social Research, The Drawing Center will host a number of performances by the venue's alumni, including: Marco Capelli and VJ Andrea Lapsus Pennisi, Zeena Parkins and Thomas Dunn, Marc Ribot, Ikue Mori and Craig Taborn, Sara Serpa, and Brian Marsella.
Zorn previously organized the 2016 series Basement Performances for The Drawing Center, six nights of events that explored the relationship between drawing, music, and cinema. The Stone at The Drawing Center: Music and Visuals will build on interest generated by this series as well as highlight The Drawing Center's support of projects that explore connections between visual art and music.
PLEASE NOTE:Doors open at 7:00pm. Please arrive on time. We cannot guarantee entry or seating after 7:30pm, and we cannot offer refunds.
Tuesday, September 12 at 7:30pm
Marco Cappelli and VJ Andrea Lapsus Pennisi
Tickets $20 via eventbrite here
Marco Cappelli is a guitarist known for his intricate compositions that blend psychedelic washes and funk rhythms. VJ Andrea Lapsus Pennisi is a producer, performer, musician, DJ, and VJ who creates visuals for performances by remixing live footage and found audio. At The Drawing Center, Cappelli and Pennisi will present Ricercari & Improvisations, for which Cappelli will draw on early-Baroque compositional style to create an intuitive musical performance complemented by a color and light environment constructed by Pennisi. Cappelli was a resident at The Stone in 2015.
Wednesday, September 13 at 7:30pm
Zeena Parkins and Thomas Dunn
Tickets $20 via eventbrite here
Zeena Parkins is a pioneering harpist whose practice has links to performance art and avant-garde traditions. She will perform with an installation by light designer Thomas Dunn, whose work has been featured in recent venues in New York, including The Kitchen, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Danspace, BRIC Arts, and BAM, among many others. Parkins, who had a residency at The Stone in 2015, will also be a resident in August 2017.
Thursday, September 14 at 7:30pm
Marc Ribot
SOLD OUT | Doors will open at 7:00pm. At 7:30pm we will begin selling standby tickets.
Marc Ribot is a genre-crossing guitarist who began his career playing at local bars in Maine during the early 1970s. Ribot was active in New York's experimental Downtown scene in the 1980s and has collaborated with jazz and soul artists Brother Jack McDuff, Wilson Pickett, and Solomon Burke. Evading categorization, Ribot's stripped-down, mercurial style is marked by beat poetry and the blues, influences that shine in projects like the Marc Ribot Trio (featuring Henry Grimes and Chad Taylor); Young Philadelphians (featuring Jamaaladeen Tacumah and Calvin Weston); and Ceramic Dog. At The Drawing Center, Ribot will perform live scores for New York-based filmmaker Jennifer Reeves's Shadows Choose Their Horrors and a selection of Reeves's short films. Ribot was a resident at The Stone in 2014.
Friday, September 15 at 7:30pm
Ikue Mori and Craig Taborn
Tickets $20 via eventbrite here
Ikue Mori is best known as a member of the seminal No Wave band DNA, and her works combine drum machines and improvisation. Mori is paired with Craig Taborn, a pianist and electronic musician whose projects build outward from traditional jazz performance. At The Drawing Center, Mori and Taborn will present Pomegranate Seeds, a film by Mori with a live score by Mori and Taborn. Both artists were residents at The Stone in 2016.
Saturday, September 16 at 7:30pm
Sara Serpa
Tickets $20 via eventbrite here
Originally from Lisbon, Sara Serpa is a singer, composer, and improviser, who has received widespread recognition for her wordless singing. Since moving to New York in 2008, she has been performing and composing jazz as well as improvised and experimental music. At The Drawing Center, Serpa will present Recognition, with Zeena Parkins, on harp, and Mark Turner, on tenor sax, a performance that will combine projected images with written and improvised music and invite viewers to reflect on Portugal's colonial past. Serpa was a resident at The Stone in 2015.
Sunday, September 17 at 7:30pm
Brian Marsella
Tickets $20 via eventbrite here
Brian Marsella is a composer and musician who was influenced early on by ragtime and classical music. Known as a versatile pianist, he has toured internationally with Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista's bands, Beat the Donkey, and Banquet of the Spirits, and is also the leader of the sonic theater supergroup, iMAGiNARiUM. At The Drawing Center, Marsella will present a live score for the 1920 German Expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Marsella was a resident at The Stone in 2016.
Image: John Zorn. Photograph by Scott Irvine.
Where Do We Stand?
Two Years of Drawing with Open Sessions
Where Do We Stand? Two Years of Drawing with Open Sessions is the second whole-group exhibition of the Open Sessions program. It includes all thirty-six artists in the 2016-17 program, giving the first floor of the museum over to an exploration of contemporary drawing, encompassing video, sculpture, photography, and installation, as well as traditional drawing forms.
Every two years Open Sessions invites a large group of artists, chosen via open call, to consider their relationship to drawing as medium, process, and metaphor. Working together over a two-year period, Open Sessions artists participate in ongoing studio visits and discussions, punctuated by small-group exhibitions at The Drawing Center.
Open Sessions artists participating in Where Do We Stand?
Regina Agu; ruby onyinyechi amanze; Daniel Bejar; Danielle Dean; Mustafa Faruki; Eric Ramos Guerrero; Sheree Hovsepian; Sue Jeong Ka; Olalekan Jeyifous; Rafael Kelman; Arnold Kemp; Nsenga Knight; Florentine and Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize; Carolyn Lambert; Lei Lei; jc lenochan; Thessia Machado; Srinivas Mangipudi; James Mercer; Irini Miga; Ana Peñalba; Sreshta Rit Premnath; Jennifer May Reiland; Gabriela Salazar; Slinko; Sun Moqing; Edwin Torres; Hồng-Ân Trương, Rodrigo Valenzuela, Ezra Wube, Sara Chang Yan, and Tuguldur Yondonjamts.
Image: Detail from Jennifer May Reiland, Blowing Smoke (after Bolaño), 2015. Watercolor and pen on paper. 7 x 10 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
David Scher Performances
Does It Fold?
For Does It Fold? in The Lab, multi-disciplinary artist David Scher will appear alongside special guests for three evenings of performances. Nightly poetry readings, film screenings, and musical performances will take place in dialogue with a pop-up exhibition of Scher's sketchbooks and musical scores. Discussions will focus on the dreamlike landscapes, figures, and follies that fill the more than 1200 sketchbooks Scher has created over nearly six decades of drawing. While giving life to the symbols and storylines that crisscross Scher's sketches, Does It Fold? will celebrate the impulse to draw and Scher's own stream-of-consciousness practice that beclouds boundaries between the real world and the imaginary.
To accompany Does It Fold?, David Scher has published a collection of artist sketchbook entries, poetry manuscripts, and found sketchbooks and scrapbooks. The book, edited by Scher, will be available through The Drawing Center's bookstore. More information about the publication is available at doesitfold.com
Thursday, September 7
Musical performances by Sean Eden and O.N.E.M. with film screenings by Mike Ballou, Stefan Bohnenberger, and David Scher
Tickets $10 via Eventbrite.com
Friday, September 8
Artist talk by David Scher with musical performances by Sean Eden and a performance by O.N.E.M., which will reference Scher's hand-drawn scores
Tickets $10 via Eventbrite.com
Saturday, September 9
Poetry readings by Jeff Dolven and Aaron Kunin with a poetry reading and film screening by Brian Dewan and musical performances by Sean Eden and O.N.E.M.
Tickets $10 via Eventbrite.com
Sean Eden is a guitarist, composer, producer, and sound designer, who is also a founding member of the New York band Luna.
David Scher, his brother Paul Scher, and Timothy Kane have been performing together as the band O.N.E.M. since 1969.
Mike Ballou is a multidisciplinary Brooklyn-based artist and the founder of Four Walls Slide and Film Club.
Stefan Bohnenberger is a Brussels-based artist and filmmaker known for his provocative, performative approach to drawing and sculpture.
Filmmakers Yoshitaka Kametani (based in London); Douglas Henderson (based in Berlin); Carter Gunn (based in Los Angeles); and Chris Rush (based in San Francisco) have created animated versions of David Scher's drawings.
Jeff Dolven is a poet and literature scholar whose work focuses on the English Renaissance, New York School, and the relationship between poetry and education. He is currently the Behrman Professor in the Humanities Council at Princeton University.
Aaron Kunin is a poet and literature scholar who has published five books of poetry, including Cold Genius: A Book of Poems, 2014, and The Mandarin, 2008. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at Pomona College where he teaches early modern literature.
Brian Dewan is a multi-media artist whose work spans poetry, painting, film, furniture design, and musical instrument design. He has released a series of short films, entitled I-CAN-SEE Filmstrips, and is one half of the electronic music duo Dewanatron.
Image: David Scher, Excerpt from sketchbooks. Courtesy of the artist.
Thread Lines
Thread Lines will be on view at Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, Kentucky, April 29 through August 6, 2017. This exhibition was on view at The Drawing Center, September 19-December 14, 2014.
This group exhibition features sixteen artists who engage in sewing, knitting, and weaving to create a wide-range of works that activate the expressive and conceptual potential of line and illuminate affinities between the mediums of textile and drawing. Multi-generational in scope, Thread Lines brings together those pioneers who—challenging entrenched modernist hierarchies—first unraveled the distinction between textile and art with a new wave of contemporary practitioners who have inherited and expanded upon their groundbreaking gestures.
Curated by Joanna Kleinberg Romanow, Assistant Curator.
List of Participating Artists: Mónica Bengoa (b. 1969, Santiago, Chile), Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911, Paris, France- d. 2010, New York, NY), Sheila Hicks (b. 1934, Hastings, NE), Ellen Lesperance (b. 1971, Minneapolis, MN), Kimsooja (b. 1957, Taegu, Korea), Beryl Korot (b. 1945, New York, NY), Sam Moyer (b. 1983, Chicago, IL), William J. O'Brien (b. 1975, Eastlake, OH), Robert Otto Epstein (b. 1979, Pittsburgh, PA), Jessica Rankin (b. 1971, Sydney, Australia), Elaine Reichek (b. 1943, New York, NY), Drew Shiflett (b. 1951, Chicago, IL), Alan Shields (b. 1944, Herington, KS- d. 2005, Shelter Island, NY), Lenore Tawney (b. 1907, Lorain, OH- d. 2007, New York, NY), and Anne Wilson (b. 1949, Detroit, MI).
Read Drawing Papers 118: Thread Lines
This catalog is sold out.
Image: Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 2006, Fabric, 15 x 22 1/4 inches. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Exploratory Works
Drawings from the Department of Tropical Research Field Expeditions
Read about this exhibition:
>The New York Times' Spring Art Guide here
>The New York Times' Science section here
This exhibition brings to light for the first time an archive of images that illustrate the formation of our modern definition of nature. William Beebe (1877–1962) was one of America's greatest popularizers of ecological thinking and biological science. Beebe literally took the lab into the jungle, rather than the jungle to the lab. The Department of Tropical Research was pioneering in that, under Beebe's direction, women were hired as lead scientists and field artists. Artist Isabel Cooper, joining in 1919, publicly relished her opportunity to travel through the jungles of Guyana juggling a "vivid serpent or tapestried lizard in one hand, and the best grade of Japanese paintbrush in the other." The structure of The Drawing Center's exhibition mirrors the two salient stages of the Department of Tropical Research's investigations: jungle field station work and floating laboratories for marine biology —revealing that artists and scientists worked closely and productively in the near past and that scientists once understood art as a valuable tool for promoting ecological thinking to a broad public. For the exhibition at The Drawing Center, Mark Dion constructed two installations which take as their inspiration images of the interiors of the DTR field stations. While one of the installations will develop the space of the jungle laboratories, the other will look to the oceanographic workshops. Numerous images in the WCS archive depict the work situations and interior conditions in both the tropical forest field stations and the floating labs of the research vessels.
Curated by Mark Dion, Katherine McLeod, and Madeleine Thompson
Exploratory Works: Drawings from the Department of Tropical Research Field Expeditions is made possible by the support of Fiona and Eric Rudin, Jean-Christophe Castelli and Lisa Silver, Judith Levinson Oppenheimer and John Oppenheimer, Anthony and Judy Evnin, Jerome L. and Ellen Stern, Ruth and Bill Ehrlich, Jennifer Levine and Jeff Aeder, and the Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Foundation.
Additional support received by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Special thanks to Canson Fine Art Papers since 1557, a proud sponsor of The Drawing Center.
Image: Chiasmodon niger Stomach Contents, Else Bostelmann Bermuda 1931. Watercolor on paper, 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm). Else Bostelmann © Wildlife Conservation Society.
Read Drawing Papers 132: Exploratory Works: Drawings from the Department of Tropical Research Field Expeditions
Buy the catalogue.
Open Sessions 10
Marginalia: Open Sessions 10 declares our present geo-political and ideological constructs to be permeable and malleable. The artists in this exhibition view borders and barriers as material through which to build new avenues of both trespass and solidarity. Marginalia features Daniel Bejar, Ana Peñalba, Sue Jeong Ka, Carolyn Lambert, Srinivas Mangipudi, Irini Miga, and Rodrigo Valenzuela.
Drawing is a mode of inquiry throughout the exhibition Valenzuela visualizes the American dream in deserted landscapes; Bejar traverses communities tenuously linked through political maneuvering; Peñalba sketches visionary architecture from the waste of the present; Ka explores the aesthetics of deportation; Miga archives tender and almost unnoticeable gestures; Lambert finds legible marks deep in Arctic ice; and Mangipudi creates notebooks inviting strangers to add their marginalia.
Curated by Lisa Sigal and Nova Benway
Daniel Bejar's Re-districting is a project that illuminates gerrymandered Congressional and State Senate districts through site-specific walks with a GPS device, tracking the artist's walk and his body as a drawing instrument. Bejar traced the borders of New York Senate District 20 during a 12 hour and 32.04 mile journey, redrawing of New York State District 20 to reveal the absurdity of its shape.
Sue Jeong Ka takes an interventionist approach to art and law in the US governmental apparatus; her work operates within the framework of institutional and postcolonial critiques. Race and immigrant issues in the United States inform her most recent and ongoing project, ID Shop.
Carolyn Lambert uses video and installation to address issues of place, territory, and the relationships that humans have with their environments. The Solastalgia Cycle, an ongoing body of work, takes climate change and extinction as a premise for considering the affective experience of living in the present.
Srinivas Mangipudi uses drawing as a mechanism for cognitive learning and as a dialogue between thought and action, along with interdisciplinary mediums involving visualization, sound, social interactions and computer programming.
Irini Miga is a visual artist based in New York City. Her installations investigate the fragmentary nature of memory and its relationship to actual objects in order to manipulate the understanding of our physical spaces. By combining sculpture with painterly qualities, her work points to shifting relationships between representation, abstraction and materiality.
Ana Peñalba is an architect. She investigates the intangible forms of the city. Her "buildings" both distort and clarify the limits between reality and fiction. Her architecture is made of the sounds, images, objects, and forms of the present, which remind us of the past while creating an architectural fiction for our future.
Rodrigo Valenzuela constructs narratives, scenes, and stories that point to the tensions found between the individual and communities. In his work, autobiographical threads inform larger universal fields of experience. His work serves as an expressive and intimate point of contact between broader realms of subjectivity and political contingency.
Amy Sillman
After Metamorphoses
For her exhibition at The Drawing Center, Amy Sillman will present a video (or what she calls an animated drawing) entitled After Metamorphoses, a work based on Ovid's epic narrative poem that she conceived in 2014 as a Resident at the American Academy in Rome. To create the video, Sillman overlaid abstract drawings (which were made in a bathtub in Berlin) with iPad sketches that precisely follow the sequence of changes that occur in Ovid's fifteen-book narrative. Set to a score by the Berlin-based musician Wibke Tiarks, the video features a variegated background that flashes beneath a series of figures as they transform one into another with a temporal rhythm. In After Metamorphoses, Sillman exercises the possibility of endless change, a theme first developed in her animated works and that continues to inform her paintings and drawings. Her adaptation of Ovid is one of a number of works that Sillman has made in collaboration with poets, including Lisa Robertson and Charles Bernstein, among others. In tandem with the exhibition, Sillman will create a limited edition zine, the eleventh in her series of zines entitled O.G.
Organized by Claire Gilman, Senior Curator
Amy Sillman: After Metamorphoses is made possible by the support of Jane Dresner Sadaka and Ned Sadaka, Sarah Peter, and Barbara Toll.
Image: Amy Sillman, After Metamorphoses, 2015–16. Video animation with iPad drawings, 5 minutes, looped. Music by Wibke Tiarks. Courtesy of the artist. (film still)
Jackson Mac Low
In Jackson Mac Low: Lines–Letters–Words, The Drawing Center will present the first solo museum exhibition of visual works by Jackson Mac Low (1922–2004) that spans the multidisciplinary artist's practice from the 1940s to the 2000s. Mac Low, who is known for composing poetry through chance procedures and automatism, first experimented with these creative processes in his drawings. The earliest drawings in the exhibition, created in the late 1940s and early 1950s, resemble pre-linguistic marks made with gestural ink brushstrokes. Later works created during the 1960s through the 1990s include series of drawings—Drawing-Asymmetries, Vocabularies, and Gathas—that emphasize the visual and aural qualities of written languages, acting as both graphic representations and performance scores. The exhibition closes with a series of thirteen drawings made in 1995; echoing the unsettled system of marks in Mac Low's early works, these drawings were composed by repeatedly handwriting terms that describe natural scenery, creating a ghostly impression with layered graphite marks. Through Jackson Mac Low: Lines–Letters–Words, The Drawing Center identifies the foundational character of drawing, a medium that significantly informed Mac Low and influenced his multidisciplinary practice for more than sixty years.
Organized by Brett Littman, Executive Director.
Jackson Mac Low: Lines–Letters–Words is made possible by the support of Glenn Horowitz, Steve Clay and Julie Harrison, Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein, and several anonymous donors.
Special thanks to Anne Tardos, Executor of the Estate of Jackson Mac Low, and to composer Michael Byron.
Image: Jackson Mac Low, Drawing-Asymmetry #8, 1961.
Read Drawing Papers 131: Jackson Mac Low: Lines-Letters-Words
Buy the catalogue.
Mateo López
Undo List
Mateo López: Undo List is a multidisciplinary installation that will be the Colombian artist's first solo museum exhibition in the United States and that will feature works on paper, sculpture, performance, and projected film. Trained as an architect in his native Bogotá, López has long used drawing as a conceptual tool to cross disciplines and aesthetic categories. Drawing is more than an artistic medium for López; it is a way of conceiving and indeed inhabiting the world. Simple drawn constructions that can be manipulated in various ways; trompe l'oeil paper renderings of two and three dimensional objects (for example, near-exact replicas of lined sheets of paper); drawings made out of the leftovers produced by cutting into other works—these are just some of the devices López uses to reveal that, as he says himself, just as everything manufactured was at one point a drawing, so too, "an image is not flat; it is an atmosphere, it contains time and space."
Organized by Claire Gilman, Senior Curator
Mateo López: Undo List is made possible by the support of the Rolex Institute, Estrellita Brodsky, Ana Sokoloff, and Ann and Marshall Webb. Additional support is provided by the Embassy of Colombia in the United States through the Promotion Plan of Colombia Abroad of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colombia.
Additional thanks to: Travesía Cuatro; Giorgio Griffa and Casey Kaplan, New York; Galeria Luisa Strina; and Casas Riegner.
The Drawing Center gives special thanks to the Rolex Institute for helping to support Mateo López's Undo List exhibition. The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative is aimed at ensuring that the world's artistic heritage is passed on from generation to generation and across continents and cultures. The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative helps rising young artists achieve their full potential by pairing them with great masters for a year of intense one-to-one collaboration. Since 2002, Rolex has brought together a total of 50 mentor and protégé pairs in the fields of architecture, dance, film, literature, music, theatre and visual arts to participate in this unique creative exchange. In the 2012-2013 series of the philanthropic program, Colombian artist Mateo López worked with acclaimed South African visual artist William Kentridge, who helped him expand the scope of his innovative drawings and installations.
Image: Mateo López, Still from Time as Activity, 2016. 2-channel video projection, 54 minutes.
Courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York.
Read Drawing Papers 132: Mateo López: Undo List
Buy the catalogue.
Open Sessions 9
Cartography of Ghosts
Open Sessions: Cartography of Ghosts explores architecture's role in shaping human behavior, creating entrenched habits and modes of thought, and even standardized forms of intimacy. While the architectural spaces we occupy often obstruct our ability to intervene in or even fully comprehend the society we have built, they also bear traces of resistance, improvisation, and misuse that allow us to imagine other ways of being. Featuring the work of Regina Agu, Mustafa Faruki, jc lenochan, Florentine and Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize, Sreshta Rit Premnath, and Gabriela Salazar, Open Sessions: Cartography of Ghosts explores drawing as a tool to make visible the personal and human traces that haunt the public and material. Through objects, drawings, collages, installations, and architecture, the works conjure apparitional traces of a present and future body.
In conjunction with Open Sessions 9: Cartography of Ghosts, please join us for an Artist Talk featuring artists Kabir Carter, Torkwase Dyson, and Chat Travieso on Thursday, December 15 at 6:30pm.
Curated by Lisa Sigal and Nova Benway
Artist Statements:
Regina Agu Drape is a series of works on paper that explores economic shifts in the built environment as they shape public discourse framing black communities. The artist returns to a text by poet Akilah Oliver, the visible unseen, as a conceptual framework for these new drawings. Renderings of tarps, drop cloths, and polyvinyl sheeting are featured as temporary landmarks of displacement and loss.
Mustafa Faruki Celebatorium is a proposal for micro-housing designed to shelter the unmarried, unloved, unwanted or otherwise permanently alone.
jc lenochan unfinished business: 12 ways to initiate a conversation is an ongoing series of drawings that focuses on pedagogical methods. On paper resembling a chalkboard surface, images and text collide, combining public school curriculum, standardized teaching jargon, fragmented lesson plans, and footnotes. Each composition intends to sharpen discourse around urgent topics. The illustrations invite pedagogical critiques in which questions and answers circle each other in the hopes of transforming barriers into paths to progress.
Florentine and Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize The Never Ending Pictures is a new series of drawings, including two large works each with an accompanying zine. The series explores narrative through a combination of pattern and figuration. The artists mix topical images from daily newspapers and magazines with personal, domestic moments to produce new images of quotidian reality.
Gabriela Salazar's Contour for Leading, Contour for Supporting Role, and Contour for Dark Corner is a serial sculpture that simultaneously appears to be a support for, and is supported by, the room where it is installed. Following the planes of The Drawing Center's Lab Gallery, Contour reiterates and adheres to the rules of found architectural choices, meanwhile suggesting a closer, unexpected, experience of those surfaces and planes. Made of two clays—ceramic and plasticine—Contour confuses these materials' usual lexicons and properties to create a precarious mimesis of the useful and the sturdy.
Sreshta Rit Premnath Slump and Wedge are site-specific pieces that are part of Sreshta Rit Premnath's ongoing project Plot, which has taken the form of photographic prints, installations and videos over the past three years. These figure-like forms embedded with sand and asphalt are limp, and require the architecture of a particular site to support them. Evoking multiple modalities of occupation, these figures at times seem to take refuge in the architecture, while at other times the site violently constrains them.
Image: Regina Agu, Fiction Diptych (Drape No. 2), 2016. Graphite on paper 12 x 9 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Olga Chernysheva
Vague Accent
Olga Chernysheva: Vague Accent is a series of drawings the Moscow-based artist made during a month-long visit to New York in November 2015. This new work is a departure for Chernysheva: although she has depicted the urban landscape throughout her career, her focus has been her home country. Vague Accent explores the relation between travel and attentiveness through a collection of ordinary scenes—subway stations, museums, city streets—overlaid with collaged texts by the artist. In her words, these works "show things that are already visible…things not asking to be looked at."
Curated by Nova Benway, Assistant Curator and Open Sessions Curator
Olga Chernysheva: Vague Accent is made possible by the support of Josef and Margot Lakonishok; GRAD: Gallery for Russian Arts and Design, London; Dita Amory; Suzanne Dubois; Erika Hoffmann; Meryl Rose; Anna L. Zelenova; Lori Spector and Max Lang; and Jan ter Haar.
Special thanks to Pace London; Gallery DIEHL, Berlin; Foxy Production, New York; Matthew Stephenson; and Yulia Dultsina.
Image: Olga Chernysheva, Untitled [Forbidden…], 2016. Charcoal and collage on paper, 23 1/2 x 33 inches (60.5 x 84 cm). © Olga Chernysheva, courtesy Gallery DIEHL, Berlin; Foxy Production, New York; and Pace London.
Read Drawing Papers 129: Olga Chernysheva Vague Accent
Buy the catalogue.
Cecily Brown
Cecily Brown: Rehearsal was on view at MCA Santa Barbara from January 28 - June 3, 2018 and was on view at The Drawing Center October 6 - December 18, 2016.
Cecily Brown: Rehearsal is the artist's first solo museum exhibition dedicated to her drawings. Arranged thematically, the more than eighty small drawings, large-scale works, and sketchbooks on view will foreground Brown's iterative reworking of motifs from her wide-reaching arsenal of source material—prints by eighteenth-century draftsman William Hogarth, pages from animal clip-art books, and the cover of Jimi Hendrix's 1968 album Electric Ladyland are just some of the images that Brown has rendered again and again in her own hand. These drawings are not studies for her paintings but rather a distinct form of aesthetic inquiry, one that isolates the investigatory impulse that grounds Brown's art in general.
Where Brown's canvases revel in the visceral immediacy of paint, her drawings offer fragmentary motifs that build upon and undo each other. Their logic productively relates to the concept of 'rehearsal'—a term derived from the Old French rehercier that originally meant to go over something again with the aim of more fully understanding it. The notion that this repetitive action was geared toward a culminating performance was a later conceit that has obscured the original definition of the word as valuing inquiry in its own right.
Indeed, what we witness in Brown's sketches is the artist's desire to visualize and respond to the images that attract and confound her (Brown has said that learning to draw is teaching yourself how to see). Painstaking and obsessive in their efforts to work and rework either an entire scene or the slightest of gestures—a turn of a lion's head here, the arch of a boy's torso there—Brown's drawings take the act of looking as their very subject.
Curated by Claire Gilman, Senior Curator
The New York Times review > click here
"The final result of all this repetition — and I assume this has been as true for Ms. Brown when she made the drawings as it was for me as I viewed them — is that everything else falls away, even the object being looked at or the figure being drawn, and the activity of drawing itself is revealed in all its strange particularity."
The New Yorker review > click here
"The London-born, New York-based painter's bright and turbulent works on paper, installed on petal-pink walls, might be the season's sexiest show. "
Cecily Brown: Rehearsal is made possible by support from the James Family Foundation, Nancy and Fred Poses, Jane and Ned Sadaka, and Marlies Verhoeven.
Special thanks to Thomas Dane Gallery.
Image: Cecily Brown, Strolling Actresses (After Hogarth), 2015. Watercolor and ink on paper. 51 1/2 x 79 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Read Drawing Papers 128: Cecily Brown Rehearsal
Buy the catalogue.
Open Sessions 8
Planes and Corridors
Open Sessions 8: Planes and Corridors is a group exhibition which considers drawing as a shifting outline around narratives of alienation, proximity and distance. Featuring artists ruby onyinyechi amanze, Eric Ramos Guerrero, Nsenga Knight, Lei Lei, James Mercer, Edwin Torres and Ezra Wube, the exhibition explores real and imagined landscapes, whose fluid borders and disorienting geographies reference issues around migration and complicated topographies of the everyday. Including work that features poetry, drawing, books and video, Planes and Corridors presents drawing as an open equation where the strange and ordinary meet.
Curated by Lisa Sigal and Nova Benway
Open Sessions is made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Tom Slaughter Open Sessions Fund, Faber-Castell, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
James Mercer, People Looking at People Looking at Condoms, ink on paper, 18 x 30 inches, 2016, Courtesy of the artist.
Gabriel de la Mora
Sound Inscriptions on Fabric
Gabriel de la Mora is best known for constructing visual works from found, discarded, and obsolete objects, such as eggshells and shoe soles. De la Mora describes these objects, which have outlived their usefulness, as caches for historical information about everyday life. In his exhibition at The Drawing Center, De la Mora will present an installation of fifty-five pairs of found speaker screens. Each screen is imprinted with an inscription created by the dust and air that circulated through the speaker during its life, recording the cadence of countless voices, advertisements, news broadcasts, soap operas, football games, and music, as well as noise, interference, and silence.
Curated by Brett Littman, Executive Director
Gabriel de la Mora: Sound Inscriptions on Fabric is made possible by the support of Sofía Anaya and Rogelio López, José Antonio García Ocejo, Cecilia Anaya and Enrique Gámez, Verónica Anaya, Sicardi Gallery, Houston, and Jack and Anne Moriniere. Additional support is provided by the Mexican Agency for International Development Cooperation (AMEXCID) with the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York and the Consulate General of Mexico in New York (SRE).
Special thanks to Timothy Taylor, London, and Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City.
Image: Gabriel de la Mora, B-189, 2015. Vintage radio speaker fabric. 17 3/8 x 12 5/8 inches. Courtesy of Timothy Taylor, London; Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City; and Sicardi Gallery, Houston.
Upcoming Free Events:
Thursday, August 25, 6:30PM
The Drawing Center will present a second performances organized by Thessia Machado, an artist whose cross-media performance practice addresses the links between sound and drawing.
Open Sessions 7
Hibernating Plan
Open Sessions 7: Hibernating Plan is a group exhibition that considers drawing in relationship to the sense of suspended time inherent in planning. Featuring artists Sheree Hovsepian, Rafael Kelman, Arnold Kemp, Thessia Machado, Sun Moqing, Sara Chang Yan, and Tuguldur Yondonjamts, the exhibition explores the notion of the "sketch" in relation to the instinct to hibernate, intuit, and mull over. Including works that feature light, sound, drawing, sculpture, and moving image, Hibernating Plan suggests that drawing exists alongside other forms of knowledge that cannot be exclusively acquired by observation, reason, or experience.
Sheree Hovsepian (b. 1974, Iran) lives and works in New York City. Her work develops from a photographic impulse in which a philosophy is explored and expanded in ways entering formal, sculptural, and material relevance while maintaining a physicality that relates naturally to the artist's hand.
Rafael Kelman (b. 1986, Vermont) is a New York based artist working across sculpture, drawing, video, and performance. His recent practice has largely revolved around an ongoing project titled Gigantomachy, which explores the collapse, inversion, and manipulation of disparate heroic and utopian fantasies, including those of the lone wolf terrorist, the geodesic dome enthusiast, and the radical mime.
Arnold Joseph Kemp (b. 1968, Boston) is an artist, writer, and educator. His drawings, prints, sculptures, and performances take advantage of an impure aesthetic, incorporating high and low culture, while highlighting practices that probe collective fictions of person and personality.
Thessia Machado (b. 1967, Brazil) lives and works in New York. Her work investigates the physicality of sound and its effect on our perception of space. Through installation, drawing, or sculpture, her pieces revel in the mechanical relationships among things: how they work and are affected by the actions and characteristics of other things.
SUN Moqing (b. 1990, Beijing) lives and works in Beijing and Hamburg. In his work, drawing is not only a still, but also a time-based media. His drawings, photographs, collages, and site-specific works attempt to redistribute space, reflect emptiness, and tell stories about time.
Sara Chang Yan (b. 1982, Lisbon) lives and works in Lisbon. Her practice is focused on drawing and proposes paper as active field, a potential energy that registers on every surface of the work. A multitude of gestures are in relation, alive: as the viewer or the light moves, the work changes. Her drawings also use silence and sound to create a sequence of moments of differing duration.
Tuguldur Yondonjamts (b. 1977, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia) lives and works in New York. His projects are focused on visual research of the space between tamed and untamed worlds, through drawing, sculpture, video, printmaking, and sound experiments.
Curated by Lisa Sigal and Nova Benway
Sun Moqing, Neighbor No. 1, 2016. Ink on object, 4 x 2 ¾ inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Abdelkader Benchamma
Representation of Dark Matter
Further activating The Drawing Center's newly designed exhibition spaces, each year an artist will be invited to create a wall drawing in the gallery's main entryway and stairwell. The Center continues this initiative in April 2015 with a commission by contemporary artist Abdelkader Benchamma (b. 1975, Mazamet, France).
For his first U.S. museum presentation, Abdelkader Benchamma will create an astronomical vortex in the strikingly graphic large-scale drawing, Representation of Dark Matter, 2015. Comprised of a series of linear abstractions and nebulous, inkblot forms the work is a highly articulated depiction of the complexity of the solar system and its nearly imperceptible dark matter. The image's swirling masses of lines are intricately rendered to resemble scientific illustrations of the Big Bang and explosive cosmic forces. Benchamma's monochromatic use of such drawing tools as black felt-tip pens, India ink, and charcoal against the gallery wall's pristine surface will result in a subtle array of tones and textures that straddles the boundaries between figuration and abstraction. As an occult mapping of time and space, this immersive installation gives form to that which is infinitely large and perpetually transforming.
Curated by Joanna Kleinberg Romanow, Adjunct Assistant Curator.
Abdelkader Benchamma: Representation of Dark Matter is made possible by the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai and galerie du jour agnes b., Paris.
Studio 360 radio on "How Do You Draw Dark Matter".
Image: Abdelkader Benchamma, Representation of Dark Matter, 2015, Mixed media, Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai and galerie du jour agnes b., Paris. (Installation photo by Jose Andres Ramirez.)
Prix Canson 2016
Please join us in congratulating artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby as the winner of the Prix Canson 2016.
You can view Njideka Akunyili Crosby's work and that of all the finalist (ruby onyinyechi amanze, Bethany Collins, David Shrigley, and Lucy Skaer) at The Drawing Center through July 1.
For this special short exhibition we are open to the public every day including Mondays and Tuesday, 12-6pm | 12-8pm on Thursday | Free admission.
The Prix Canson, one of the most prestigious annual drawing prizes in the world, is partnering with The Drawing Center to exhibit the works of their 2016 finalists from June 22 through July 1, 2016. Canson® and The Drawing Center are linked by their shared passion for drawing and by their ambition to promote art to wide and diverse audiences. Past Prix Canson exhibitions have been held in major museums and galleries in Paris and Barcelona. Previous winners of the Prix Canson have been: Fabien Mérelle (2010), Ronald Cornelissen (2011), Virginia Chihota (2013), and Simon Evans (2014). These winners represent the best artists today worldwide who are working with drawing. The Prix Canson president for 2016 is the world-renowned Brazilian artist Tunga. He will be joined by a jury of top museum directors, curators, and collectors in the art world. During the Prix Canson exhibition at The Drawing Center, Canson® will host a series of talks, presentations, and events with the finalists for the public and press.
ruby onyinyechi amanze (b. 1982 - Lives and works in New York City)
Bethany Collins (b. 1984 - Lives and works in Atlanta, Chicago and New York City)
Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983 - Lives and works in Los Angeles)
David Shrigley (b. 1968 – Lives and works in Glasgow)
Lucy Skaer (b. 1975 - Lives and works in Glasgow)
Tunga, Artist (Rio de Janeiro) – President of the Jury
Brett Littman, Executive Director, The Drawing Center (New York) – Vice President of the Jury
Ian Alteveer, Associate Curator, MET (New York)
Bice Curiger, Artistic Director, Vincent van Gogh Foundation Arles and
editor-in-chief, Parkett (Zürich)
Amanda Hunt, Assistant Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York)
Helen Molesworth, Chief Curator, MOCA (Los Angeles)
Frédéric Paul, Curator, MNAM/ Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris)
Katherine Stout, Head of Programme, ICA (London)
Michaël Woolworth, Art Printer (Paris)
Image: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Nyado: The Thing Around Her Neck, 2011. Charcoal, acrylic, colored pencil, lace, collage and transfers on paper. 7ft x 7ft. Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro, London.
Upcoming Free Events:
Wed, June 22 at 6pm
Conversation between Prix Canson 2016 Juror, Brett Littman, curator and Executive Director at The Drawing Center and 2016 Prix Canson finalist Lucy Skaer.
Wed, June 29 at 6pm
Conversation between Prix Canson 2016 Juror, Amanda Hunt, Assistant Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem and 2016 Prix Canson Finalist ruby onyinyechi amanze.
Drawing Dialogues
Selections from the Sol LeWitt Collection
Please note: the Lab gallery section of Drawing Dialogues: Selections from the Sol LeWitt Collection will be on view through Sunday, June 5.
The Drawing Center presents Drawing Dialogues: Selections from the Sol LeWitt Collection, an exhibition featuring over one hundred works by more than sixty artists from the renowned artist's extraordinary collection. It is the first large-scale exhibition of the collection to be held in New York in over thirty years. The Drawing Center show concentrates on minimal and conceptual drawing, which forms the core of the collection, with classic examples from key figures like Mel Bochner, Hanne Darboven, Eva Hesse, and Lawrence Weiner. It also includes works by artists such as Alighiero Boetti, Jan Dibbets, Kazuko Miyamoto, and Fred Sandback that investigate mark-making in unexpected materials and formats. In addition to exploring cross-connections among LeWitt's peers, the exhibition presents contributions by older artists whose methods inspired LeWitt, as well as younger artists whose approaches are in dialogue with earlier generations while extending the medium in new directions. Finally, the exhibition features select works by LeWitt himself—including a wall drawing—that resonate with the other objects on view. Presenting work in drawing, sculpture, photography, print, and installation, Drawing Dialogues: Selections from the Sol LeWitt Collection re-examines minimal and conceptual art and the parameters of the drawn medium through the organizing lens of one of its greatest practitioners.
Sol LeWitt's status as one of the paramount American artists of the past half-century is well established. What is less known is that LeWitt was also an avid collector who during his lifetime amassed an extraordinary ensemble of over 4,000 pieces by approximately 750 artists through purchase, exchange, and gifts. The majority are works from the 1960s and 1970s by LeWitt's friends and peers whom he admired and encouraged; but the collection also reaches backwards and forwards from that time to embrace art from other periods and cultures. The LeWitt Collection is a remarkable example of an artist's extraordinary curiosity and generosity, perhaps the truest portrait of a man who was notoriously private but who dedicated himself to his artistic interests and relationships. It is also a portrait of artistic developments in the 1960s and 1970s, when European and American minimal and conceptual art came into their own. Indeed, the collection can be viewed as a lived archive of the world in which LeWitt moved and worked, even as it examines the possibilities for conceptual art across media, disciplines, and time periods.
Curated by Claire Gilman, Senior Curator of The Drawing Center, and Béatrice Gross, Guest Curator and LeWitt scholar.
Drawing Dialogues: Selections from the Sol LeWitt Collection will include works by William Anastasi, Carl Andre, Stephen Antonakos, Richard Artschwager, Alice Aycock, Jo Baer, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Gene Beery, Franco Bemporad, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, John Cage, Enrico Castellani, Lucinda Childs, Chuck Close, Hanne Darboven, Honoré Daumier, Jan Dibbets, Peter Downsbrough, Sam Durant, Jackie Ferrara, Dan Flavin, Charles Gaines, Gilbert & George, Philip Glass, Dan Graham, Nancy Graves, Hans Haacke, Eva Hesse, Channa Horwitz, Shirazeh Houshiary, Clarence John Laughlin, Ray Johnson, Donald Judd, Alex Katz, On Kawara, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Jannis Kounellis, Jacques Lacombe, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Jane Logemann, Richard Long, Lee Lozano, Alvin Lucier, Robert Mangold, Mario Merz, Kazuko Miyamoto, Ree Morton, Eadweard Muybridge, Maurizio Nannucci, Giulio Paolini, Henry Pearson, Adrian Piper, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Steve Reich, Dorothea Rockburne, Fred Sandback, Jan Schoonhoven, Robert Smithson, Pat Steir, Allyson Strafella, Old Tutuma Tjapangati, David Tremlett, Yoshiiku Utagawa, Georges Vantongerloo, Bernar Venet, Ruth Vollmer, Hannah Weiner, Lawrence Weiner, and Franz West.
Drawing Dialogues: Selections from the Sol LeWitt Collection is made possible by the support of Marian Goodman Gallery. Additional support is provided by Agnes Gund, Wynn and Sally Kramarsky, the Kraus Family Foundation, Mickey Cartin, Christie's, Carol Saper, the Evelyn Toll Family Foundation, Kathleen Irvin Loughlin, Steve Henry and Philip Shneidman, William and Donna Acquavella, Paula Cooper Gallery, Gabriella de Ferrari, Tony and Gail Ganz, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron, Leon B. and Cynthia H. Polsky, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Richard Roth, Michael and Nancy Rosen Blackwood, and Pat Steir.
Upcoming Free Events:
Saturday, April 16, 2:30 and 4:30PM
Inevitable Music with Sébastien Roux
Thursday, April 28, 6:30PM
Join the curators of the exhibition, Claire Gilman, Senior Curator at The Drawing Center, and Béatrice Gross, Guest Curator and LeWitt scholar, for a walkthrough of the show.
Thursday, May 12, 6-8PM
Albers Color Workshop: Perception Through Iteration
Image: Photograph of Sol LeWitt's loft, 117 Hester Street, New York, 1968. Black-and-white photograph. 3 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches. LeWitt Collection, Chester, CT.
Louise Despont: Energy Scaffolds and Information Architecture
Energy Scaffolds and Information Architecture is the first solo museum exhibition for Louise Despont, an artist best known for using compasses, stencils, and rulers to create intricate and deeply meditative drawings on ledger paper. For Energy Scaffolds and Information Architecture, The Drawing Center has commissioned a new site-specific architectural installation and several series of large-scale drawings that have been influenced by Despont's recent relocation to Bali.
The first architectural enclosure on view, entitled Pure Potential, consists of a wooden façade covered by wooden dowels that create a textured and protective surface. For Despont, the series of eight Pure Potential drawings represent the transition of energy from formlessness into form.
The second architectural space, which is oval in shape, holds a monumental frieze drawing that is sixty feet in length, six feet in height, and composed of seven panels. The drawing depicts the relationship between a material form and a subtle body—the independent entity that manifests through the physical self. For Despont, the drawn lines in each work symbolize the invisible structures, channels, and pathways of energy that flow through and exist in symbiosis with the human body. The seven sections of this monumental work are divided by ten columns, each of which is fitted with a diamond form surrounded by a checkered pattern. The design is inspired by the Balinese kain poleng, a manifestation of sacred balance, while the diamond symbolizes the eye of awareness.
As part of the installation, Despont has invited conceptual artist Aaron Taylor Kuffner to present his gamelatron, an original instrument created by Kuffner that is a robotic variant of the gamelan, the traditional Balinese and Javanese orchestra that includes vibraphones, drums, chimes, bells, and gongs.
Curated by Brett Littman, Executive Director.
Louise Despont: Energy Scaffolds and Information Architecture is made possible by the support of Anna Getty, Jerry Bruckheimer, Fred and Nancy Poses, Eric and Fiona Rudin, John Sughrue, Steven Roth, Barry Siadat, Morris Orden, and David and Susan Marco. Additional support is provided by members of The Drawing Center's Exhibition Fund.
Special thanks to Nicelle Beauchene Gallery.
Image: Louise Despont, Energy Scaffolds and Information Architecture (Subtle and Circulatory, Female), 2015. Colored pencil and graphite on antique ledger book pages. 71 1/2 x 68 1/2, 12 ledger book pages. Courtesy of the artist and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery.
Upcoming Free Events:
Saturday, February 6, 10:30AM - Noon Family Art Workshop
Thursday, March 10, 6:30PM Performance
Jennifer Bartlett: Hospital
Jennifer Bartlett: Hospital is the first museum exhibition of this new series of ten pastels made in 2012. The works are based on a series of photographs that Bartlett took during an extended stay at Greenberg Pavilion at New York-Presbyterian Hospital / Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, and which she later cropped and edited in her studio. Bartlett has included pastels in other large-scale serial works like In the Garden (1980) and Air: 24 Hours (1991–92). As well, pastels have acted as a sort of travelogue for Bartlett, with various series referencing places she has lived in or traveled to, including: Cape Cod, Bermuda, Aspen, Iceland, Mayeaux Island, Sun Valley, Amagansett, Brooklyn, and Manhattan.
With Hospital, Bartlett continues her long-established practice of close observation and responsiveness to her environment, but this time turns her attention to interior spaces and window views rather than landscapes, gardens, and atmospheric conditions. The drawings mine the liminal experience of "hospital time," characterized by long periods of waiting interspersed with highly organized routines of treatment, medication, and physical therapy. This combination of boredom and activity often heightens one's awareness of details, and Bartlett exploits these sensations to create images that eschew sentimentality while remaining indelibly poignant.
Curated by Brett Littman, Executive Director.
Jennifer Bartlett: Hospital is made possible by the support of Jerry Speyer, Michael Forman and Jennifer Rice, and the Schiff Foundation. Additional support is provided by members of The Drawing Center's Exhibition Fund.
Image: Jennifer Bartlett, Hospital, 2012, Pastel on paper, 30 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Michael Forman and Jennifer Rice. Photo by Joseph Hu.
Upcoming Free Events:
Saturday, February 13, 2PM Walkthrough
Please Make This Look Nice
Design, lecture, and micro-exhibit participants include: Anthony Carhuayo, Erik Carter, Delcan & Company [Pablo Delcan + Jocelyn Tsaih], Stephen Doyle, Elliott Earls, Claudine Eriksson, Experimental Jetset [Erwin Brinkers, Danny van den Dungen + Marieke Stolk], John Gall, Carin Goldberg, Minkoo Kang, Ian Keliher, Eric Ku, Margot Laborde, Sue Lee, The Herb Lubalin Study Center for Design & Typography, AJ Mapes, Alex Merto, Joe Newton, Paul Sahre, Paula Scher, Small Stuff [Dinah Fried, Joe Marianek + Brenda Wu], Alex Stikeleather, Alexander Tochilovsky, Sally Thurer, Jan Wilker, Zipeng Zhu, and ZutAlors! [Frank DeRose + Brendan Griffiths].
For Please Make This Look Nice: The Graphic Design Process as an Act of Drawing a simulated studio will be installed in The Drawing Center's Lab gallery. Throughout the course of the show, a select group of professionals from throughout New York's vibrant graphic design community will be invited to work on unique and original design assignments and in a variety of formats and media including typography, logos, books, posters, motion, editorial, and more. All work will be printed, displayed, and projected for the exhibition audience to view, discuss, and engage with directly.
This exhibition looks to expand the general and most basic understand of graphic design by turning attention away from finished design solutions—the "what" of graphic design—to consider the "how" and "why," focusing on the myriad techniques and methodologies involved in the graphic design process, including writing, traditional drawing, photography, prototyping, assemblage, collage, and collecting. Rather than pointing to individual pieces in a designer's archive as specific works of "process drawing," Please Make This Look Nice considers the whole graphic design process itself as an act of drawing. As Milton Glaser explains in an interview for the related publication: "Drawing is a feedback mechanism to adjust your thinking. It's a way of seeing whether what you're thinking can become manifest."
Curated by Peter Ahlberg, principal of AHL&CO and faculty at the School of Visual Arts, New York.
Design professionals from throughout New York's vibrant graphic design community will be working on unique and original design assignments in a variety of formats and media including typography, posters, 3D, motion, books, and more.
Designers participating include Erik Carter, Pablo Delcan, Elliott Earls, Carin Goldberg, Eric Ku, Sue Lee, Alex Merto, Joe Newton, Small Stuff [Joe Marianek + Dinah Fried], Alex Stikeleather, and Zipeng Zhu.
See work by the following designers:
Friday, February 19 – Friday. February 26
Select historical and archival materials from The Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography
Saturday, February 27 – Thursday, March 3
John Gall, Collage materials & sketchbooks
Friday, March 4 – Sunday, March 13
Experimental Jetset, Preparatory drawings, prints, models, and photography
Wednesday, March 16 – Sunday, March 20
Paul Sahre, Screenprint make-readys
Upcoming Free Events:
Wednesday, March 16, 6PM Closing Reception
Thursday, March 17, 6PM
National Design Award–winner Stephen Doyle talks about the way non-traditional
tools and techniques have made their way into his graphic design practice.
Saturday, March 19, 2PM
Designer Carin Goldberg and curator Peter Ahlberg discuss drawing and
the graphic design process following a walk-through of the exhibition.
Image: Studio wall. Photo by AHL&CO.
Rachel Goodyear: Restless Guests
UK-based artist Rachel Goodyear will present a selection of drawings and hand-drawn animations in The Lab corridor. The animated works loop seamlessly, unfolding a narrative that never fully coheres, while the drawings - inspired by found sources, Goodyear's own photographs, and studies of invented scenarios - evoke a sense of drifting in and out of focus and consciousness.
Curated by Jessica Man, Curatorial Assistant.
Rachel Goodyear: Restless Guests is made possible by the support of Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.
Image: Rachel Goodyear, Afternoon, 2011, Pencil and watercolor on paper, framed, 23 3/5 x 16 1/2 inches (60 x 42 cm). Courtesy Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, Copyright the artist.
James Sheehan: Death of Malevich
To activate The Drawing Center's newly designed galleries, the institution's curators have invited artists to create long-term drawing-based installations in atypical locations around the facility. The first project is James Sheehan's Death of Malevich (2013). Sheehan's postage-stamp-size watercolor on board is inserted directly into one of the walls of The Lab corridor, creating a keyhole effect that voyeuristically transports the viewer into another realm. His infinitesimal image Death of Malevich derives from a photograph of famed Russian Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich lying in state, surrounded by his artworks. Sheehan's exploration of the relationship between distance and scale results in a scene that appears legible from afar, but that gradually dissolves on approach—even as the work's recessed installation (and the placement of the painter's acclaimed Black Square, 1915, directly above the dead man's head) draw the viewer in. This work was also featured in our recent exhibition Small..
James Sheehan, Death of Malevich, 2013, Watercolor on rag board, inserted into wall, 7/8 x 1 inch. Courtesy of the artist.
Rashid Johnson: Anxious Men
Since distinguishing himself as the youngest artist in Freestyle, the landmark 2001 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Johnson has established himself as one of the preeminent artists of his generation. Invoking such varied themes as the black experience in America, the dialogue between abstraction and figuration, and the relationship between art and personal identity, Johnson has been discussed within the context of contemporary painting, photography, sculpture, video, installation art, and even performance. Now, with the Anxious Men, drawing enters that list.
Universally accessible and employing common visual tropes such as the monochrome and the grid, Johnson's work is also self-referential making specific allusion to his upbringing in Chicago and the Afro-centric values of his parents. In Rashid Johnson: Anxious Men, the artist creates a site-specific installation in the Drawing Room gallery. The core of the exhibition is a new series of black-soap-and-wax-on-tile portraits that Johnson calls his "anxious men." Executed by digging into a waxy surface, they enact a kind of drawing through erasure and represent the first time Johnson has worked figuratively outside of photography or film, and on such a small scale. Whereas Johnson's previous work has taken a more cerebral approach to questions of race and political identity, the drawn portraits confront the viewer with a visceral immediacy. The portraits will be set within a multi-sensory environment that includes wallpaper featuring a photograph of the artist's father from the year Johnson was born, and an audio sound track comprised of Melvin Van Peebles's "Love, That's America," a song that originally appeared in Peebles's 1970 film Watermelon Man and that was recently pressed into service by the Occupy Wall Street movement. In this way, the exhibition will create an immersive space that implicates not only the artist but also the viewer in its interrogation of selfhood and identity.
Curated by Claire Gilman, Senior Curator.
Lead support for Rashid Johnson: Anxious Men is provided by Joseph G. Mizzi. Additional support is provided by Jeffrey A. Hirsch, John and Amy Phelan, Erica Samuels, and Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond J. Learsy. Special thanks to Hauser and Wirth.
Image: Rashid Johnson, Untitled Anxious Men, 2015. White ceramic tile, black soap, wax, 73 x 47 x 2 inches, © Rashid Johnson, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Martin Parsekian.
Richard Pousette-Dart: 1930s
Best known as a founding member of the New York School of painting, Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992) initially pursued a career as a sculptor. The son of Nathaniel Pousette, a painter, art director, educator, and art writer, and Flora Louise Dart, a poet and musician, Pousette-Dart was raised in an environment surrounded by music, poetry, and the visual arts, and began drawing and painting by the age of eight. Introduced to African, Oceanic, and Native American art by his father, Pousette-Dart made frequent visits to the Museum of Natural History as a young man. In 1938, he forged a close friendship with John Graham, whose writings were closely aligned with his own interests in spiritual concerns and so-called primitive art. Throughout the 1930s, Pousette-Dart was most entranced by the work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, whose abstract sculptures, drawings, and forms in brass greatly informed the orientation of the young American artist.
The Drawing Center exhibition will be the first in-depth consideration of Richard Pousette-Dart's drawings from the 1930s, a period when the artist pursued directly-carved sculpture, yet also painted, experimented with photography, and created numerous works on paper. These early drawings explore Pousette-Dart's concerns about sculpture and working three-dimensionally, and many reference the figure through full-frontal or profile views as they consider space, orientation, and volume. Additionally, numerous studies allude to dance, animal forms, masks, and heads, and many examples offer an accumulation of abstract and geometric forms, particularly for his brasses—small sculptures meant to be "held in the hand." The exhibition will include approximately eighty works from the 1930s including drawings, notebooks, and brasses.
Curated by Brett Littman, Executive Director.
Richard Pousette-Dart: 1930s is made possible by the support of The Estate of Richard Pousette-Dart and Pace Gallery.
Image: Richard Pousette-Dart, Agony, 1930s, Graphite, ink, and wash on paper, 18 ½ x 14 ⅞ inches. Photographer: Jason Wierzbicki. Courtesy of The Richard Pousette-Dart Estate.
Open Sessions 6
Open Sessions continues with artist-directed group exhibitions. Open Sessions 6 features the work of Amadeo Azar, Daniel Barroca, Youmna Chlala, Lea Cetera, Onyedika Chuke, Alexandra Lerman, Harold Mendez, Marcelo Moscheta, and Ronny Quevedo. Organized by the artists and Nova Benway and Lisa Sigal, Curators of the Open Sessions program.
Amadeo Azar explores the interrelation between the visual languages of modernism with political and social movements in Latin America, and the way those Utopian moments were disrupted as they encountered local circumstances. Daniel Barroca works with memory and history. His projects map forces anchored by images, objects, words, historical figures, and ideas. Lea Cetera produces temporal installations that examine the mediation of technology and the alienation of the human body. Through recent installations that include filmed performances, the artist attempts to create an alienating/disorienting illusory effect. Youmna Chlala investigates architecture and fate. Her work is situated in places or bodies that translate themselves against or through an external world that is constantly trying to name them. Onyedika Chuke has been assembling an archive termed "The Forever Museum"—a collection of objects and images based on Internet-sourced documents that redistribute images and theories pertaining to civilizations, political rebellions, riots, and warfare. Alexandra Lerman proposes clay as a discursive medium. Her ink circulation drawings and "memory negatives" use copyrighted and patented systems to explore the complexities of contemporary body language and refer to the body located within institutional and natural environments. Harold Mendez draws upon ideas of absence and displacement to reference reconstructions of place and identity in the United States and Latin America, with a focus on how the past manifests in the present, and thereby trigger new inquiry. Marcelo Moscheta excavates the memories inscribed in the stone paths left by the ancient civilizations and uses GPS coordinates to draw his displacement over the surface of the planet. Ronny Quevedo traces culture through history, language, and mapping. Using a variety of forms from personal anecdotes to colloquialisms, coats of arms to store signage, games to modules, his work addresses concepts of displacement.
Organized by the artists and Nova Benway and Lisa Sigal, Curators of the Open Sessions program.
Image: Ronny Quevedo, The History of the rules and measures #4, 2015. Oak tag stencils on oak tag pattern paper. 44 x 60 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Open Sessions 5
Open Sessions continues with artist directed group exhibitions. Open Sessions 5 will present reliefs, recordings, and imprints of exchange that examine how personal language relates to public discourses, and the artist's drive to "do art" at any cost. This exhibition will feature the work of Lauren Bakst, Jimbo Blachly, Daniel Lichtman, Yuri Masnyj, Laura Morrison, Catya Plate, Sarada Rauch, and Alfred Steiner. Organized by the artists and Nova Benway and Lisa Sigal, Curators of the Open Sessions program.
Lauren Bakst's work takes the form of choreography, performance, video, and writing, exploring questions about subjectivity, affect, memory, and history. Jimbo Blachly's drawings, paintings, sculptures, and installations combine art historical and literary references filtered through humor and daily experience. Using such formats as the webcast, lecture, and sermon, Daniel Lichtman's work explores the interrelations between belief, gender, and intimacy. Yuri Masnyj makes drawings and sculptures that investigate how the self is registered in our compulsion to collect, compose, and display objects. Laura Morrison thinks of her work as publishing. In writing and gallery-based forms, she examines the awkward clashes between what it means to be vulnerable and what it means to be accountable. Catya Plate uses sculpture, drawing, and animated film to explore how the creation of a new mythology may help address contemporary manifestations of anxiety and angst. Combining video, animation, and object making, Sarada Rauch's work explores how contemporary technologies of image-making reimagine historical narrative forms. And Alfred Steiner's work in drawing, sculpture, and watercolor questions the relationship between artistic technique and authenticity, contrivance, and artifice.
Organized by the artists and Nova Benway and Lisa Sigal, Curators of the Open Sessions program.
Image: Catya Plate, Seeing It Through, detail, 2015. Foam core, paper, wood, aqua resin, LED lights, batteries, acrylic paint, thread, fabric, 23 x 23 x 6 ½ inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Drawing Sound Part II: String Noise
DOORS WILL OPEN AT 7PM. Performances will begin at 7:30pm and end approx. 9pm. First come, first serve. Standing only, no seating.
For its 2015–16 season, The Drawing Center has developed two multi-evening events for its newly renovated galleries that demonstrate the institution's increased focus on the intersections between drawing, sound, and performance-based art. Interspersed between major exhibitions, Drawing Sound will bring commissions of new work to The Drawing Center's space and will build upon the institution's recent explorations of drawing and music in the work of Iannis Xenakis and William Engelen. Billy Martin and String Noise (Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim Harris) will curate the two Drawing Sound performances in July and September of 2015, respectively.
Produced by Brett Littman, Executive Director.
Part II: String Noise
For the second part of Drawing Sound this fall, String Noise are curating a three-night event, featuring different performers each night.
Night 1 - September 11, 7:30pm | Online tickets are SOLD OUT. Limited number available at the door on the performance night.
Alvin Lucier (composer)
Ben Manley (sound engineer)
Performing BIRD AND PERSON DYNING (1975) and Music for Snar Drum, Pure Wave Oscillator and One or More Reflective Surfaces (1990)
Conrad Harris (violin, from String Noise)
Performing TAPPER (2004)
NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS, a documentary by Viola Rusche & Hauke Harder on
Lucier, will be playing in The Lab gallery.
Night 2 - September 12, 7:30pm | Go here to buy tickets.
Greg Saunier (composer)
Curt Sydnor (pianist)
Performing the US premiere of Opera, Quasi Fortississimo, and a new hour-long work for piano, composed by Greg Saunier, performed by Curt Sydnor.
Followed by Les Bon Hommes: William Kuehn of Rainer Maria (drums), Deron Pulley (bass), and Greg Saunier (guitar & vocals)
Night 3 - September 13, 7:30pm | Go here to buy tickets.
Jad Fair (guitar)
Lumberob (aka Rob Erickson)
Performing a series of songs and vocal electronics, alongside projections of Fair's paper cuttings
Throughout the three-day event, Echoic Memory, a site-specific sound piece by artist and composer Spencer Topel, will be installed in the Drawing Room.
An episode on Jad Fair, by Hardly Sound, a documentary TV series focusing on Texas
underground music and artists, will be playing in The Lab gallery.
Image: Jad Fair. Photo by Jutta Brandt.
Drawing Sound is made possible by the support of an anonymous donor, Charles Price, Galia Meiri-Stawski and Axel Stawski, and Isabel Stainow Wilcox.
Open Sessions 4
The Open Sessions program continues with its fourth artist-directed group exhibition. Exploring drawing through maps, video, radio programming, publications, language, and video conference technology, the exhibition features the work of of Colleen Asper & Marika Kandelaki, Matt Bua, Maurice Carlin (with Anne Gilman, Ethan Hayes-Chute, Annette Knol, Elizabeth Leister and Michael Namkung), Kerry Downey, Nicolas Dumit Estevez and Laia Sole, Maximilian Goldfarb, Brad Killam, Kamau Patton, and Lior Shvil.
Organized by the artists and Nova Benway and Lisa Sigal, Curators of the Open Sessions program.
Open Sessions is made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Faber-Castell, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Image: Colleen Asper and Marika Kandelaki, Dictionary of the Hole, 2012 Photograph , dimensions variable (complete work includes text). Courtesy of the artists.
Robin Rhode: Drawing Waves
In Drawing Waves, South African–born, German-based artist Robin Rhode will exhibit his signature, stop-action photographs (in which he draws in public streets and then a performer interacts with the inscribed image) in a new photographic sequence entitled, Breaking Waves, 2014-15, which whimsically depicts a young boy surfing in the sea. The illusionistic swell of the waves–articulated by Rhode's drawn gestures onto a dilapidated city wall–reiterates the boy's deft maneuvering of the ocean and this type of athletic physicality is echoed in the accompanying wall drawing Paries Pictus-Draw The Waves, 2015. Rhode will partner with a group of children aged 8-10 years to create this large-scale mural of the high seas, which will be video recorded and on view. He begins the process by attaching vinyl cutouts of seventeenth century mercantile ships to the gallery wall, and then invites the children to freely draw the surrounding body of water using giant, custom-made oil crayons. The nautical motif is largely inspired by the East India Company fleet, who were the first colonialists in Southern Africa—a nod to Rhode's own childhood and the indignities he faced growing up in a post-apartheid South Africa. Yet as a participatory artwork, Rhode offers a more hopeful message by bringing urban youth culture to the fore and demonstrating the power of pure imagination.
Curated by Joanna Kleinberg Romanow, Adjunct Assistant Curator.
Robin Rhode: Drawing Waves is made possible by the Wagner Family Foundation and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Special thanks to Allison and Larry Berg.
Image: Robin Rhode, Breaking Waves, 2014 , One of sixteen C-prints, 14 x 24 inches each, Courtesy of the artist. Collection of Allison & Larry Berg.
Name It by Trying to Name It: Open Sessions 2014-15
Initiated in 2014, Open Sessions is a new program at The Drawing Center through which a large group of artists consider their relationship to drawing as medium, process, and metaphor. Working together over a two-year period, Open Sessions artists participate in ongoing studio visits and discussions, punctuated by small group exhibitions at The Drawing Center, as well as other self-organized shows in New York and abroad.
Name It by Trying to Name It: Open Sessions 2014-15 includes all artists in the program, giving the first floor of the museum over to an exploration of contemporary drawing, encompassing performance, video, sculpture, and installation, as well as traditional drawing forms. The show's numerous collaborations, in which ideas and materials are shared, emphasize the medium's flexibility and process-oriented nature. The exhibition will evolve over its six-week run, as some artworks enter and exit in two-week cycles, while others remain constant throughout the show's run. Taken as a whole, Name It by Trying to Name It presents a window into nearly two years of thinking about drawing.
Single Occupancy, a performance work by Lauren Bakst and Yuri Masnyj will take place in the gallery.
Friday, August 7 at 2pm & 3pm
Thursday, August 13 at 7pm
Thursday, August 20 at 5pm
Friday, August 21 at 2pm & 3pm
Organized by Nova Benway and Lisa Sigal, Curators of the Open Sessions program.
Open Sessions is made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Faber-Castell, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Image: Jimbo Blachly, Drawing Wagon, 2015, Paper, ink, wood, Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist.
Drawing Sound Part I: Billy Martin
DOORS WILL OPEN AT 7PM. Performances will begin at 7:30pm and end approx. 9pm. First come, first serve. Standing only, no seating.
For its 2015–16 season, The Drawing Center has developed two multi-evening events for its newly renovated galleries that demonstrate the institution's increased focus on the intersections between drawing, sound, and performance-based art. Interspersed between major exhibitions, Drawing Sound will bring commissions of new work to The Drawing Center's space and will build upon the institution's recent explorations of drawing and music in the work of Iannis Xenakis and William Engelen. Billy Martin and String Noise (Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim) will curate the two Drawing Sound performances in July and September of 2015, respectively.
Co-produced by Brett Littman, Executive Director and Jessica Man, Curatorial Assistant.
Part 1: Billy Martin
For the Wandering performance series in July of 2015, Martin has invited world-renowned musicians to interpret and perform his graphic scores and automatic drawings. Set list for each night is subject to change.
Night 1 - July 8, 7:30pm | Go here to buy tickets.
Soloists: Chris Cochrane (guitar), Billy Martin (percussion), John Medeski (keyboard synthesizer), Ikue Mori (electronics), and Ned Rothenberg (clarinets, saxophone, shakuhachi)
Interpreting Billy Martin's graphic scores
Ensemble: Alarm Will Sound (vibraphone, marimba, clarinet, trombone, viola, gongs) with guests Chris Cochrane, John Medeski, and Ned Rothenberg
Performing Coral Sea, Heart Strings, The Animated Veve, Chaman
Night 2 - July 9, 7:30pm | Go here to buy tickets.
Soloists: Cyro Baptista (percussion, voice) and Anthony Coleman (keyboards)
Interpreting Billy Martin's graphic scores
Yoshiko Chuma (dancer) and Billy Martin (percussion)
Performing Pas de deux
Ensemble: Fang Percussion (3-20 percussionists)
Performing Stridulations for the Good Luck Feast (for temple blocks and bamboo) and Drawing Sound (gongs, water phone and other metallics)
Night 3 - July 10, 7:30pm | Online tickets are now sold out. There is still a limited availability to purchase tickets at The Drawing Center. Doors open at 7pm.
Soloists: Annie Gosfield (electronics) and Billy Martin (percussion)
Interpreting Billy Martin's graphic scores
Paul Auster (spoken word) and Hal Willner (tape machines)
Reflections on the wandering mind, improvisation, and chance
Ensemble: Sirius Quartet (violins, viola, cello)
Performing Sam, My Morning Feldman, Stridulations, and Martin's graphic score
Throughout the three-day event, Stridulations for the Good Luck Feast, a "scentstallation" by Phaedra Martin that encompasses sound, visuals, and scent, will be installed in the Drawing Room. In The Lab, Chaman, a 16mm film directed by Billy Martin and edited by Marco Franzoni will be playing on continuous loop.
Drawing Sound will continue September 11–13, 2015, when String Noise will present a three-night event featuring different performers at The Drawing Center. See details here.
Drawing Sound is made possible by the support of an anonymous donor, Charles Price, Galia Meiri-Stawski and Axel Stawski, and Isabel Stainow Wilcox.
Image: Billy Martin aka Illy B, Veve 32, 2009, Ink on paper , 13.5 x 11 inches, Courtesy of the artist.
Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm
Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm will be on view at The Art Museum at The University of Kentucky from May-July, 2016. This exhibition was on view at The Drawing Center April 10- June 28, 2015 and traveled to the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas in Austin from July 11-November 15, 2015
Since completing her M.F.A. at Columbia University in 2006, Natalie Frank has been making a name for herself with energetic, visceral paintings that boldly embrace the liminal space between figuration and abstraction. A virtuoso painter and draftswoman, Frank is unique among her peers in her willingness to employ the traditional mediums of painting and drawing in the service of taboo themes. Focusing on the dialogue between flesh and spirit, the artist explores, in her own words, the parallel poles of "longing and desire but also disgust and fascination" that constitute humanity.
At The Drawing Center, Frank applies her visual and psychological acumen to that most evocative and misunderstood of literary forms, the fairytale—specifically the original, unsanitized stories transcribed by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm between 1812 and 1857. Only a few contemporary artists have worked within the fairytale genre; fewer still have systematically interrogated the complexity of these tales and the way in which they address social and sexual mores that continue to have relevance today. Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm presents twenty-five drawings out of a total of seventy-five that Frank completed over a period of three-and-a-half years between 2011 and 2014. The drawings are made in gouache and chalk pastel—the first time that Frank has worked exclusively in this medium—producing both gritty and luminous surface effects. Engaging the intersection between body and mind, reality and fiction, the series can be seen as a contemporary feminist reimagining of a symbolist legacy.
Curated by Claire Gilman, Senior Curator.
Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm is made possible by the support of The Evelyn Toll Family Foundation, Merrill Mahan, Stephanie Ingrassia, Sarah Peter, Kim Manocherian, Irwin and MaryAnn Gold, and Liz Parks.
Special thanks to Rhona Hoffman Gallery and ACME.
ARTFORUM - 500 Words interview with Natalie Frank
NEW YORK OBSERVER - on Frank
ARTINFO - Linda Nochlin on Frank
Image: Natalie Frank, Cinderella II, 2011-4, Gouache and chalk pastel on paper, 22 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin; Promised gift of Kathleen Irvin Loughlin and Chris Loughlin.
İnci Eviner: Runaway Girls
The Drawing Center has commissioned Turkish multimedia artist İnci Eviner to create a new work, entitled Runaway Girls. Eviner uses repetitive, hypnotically shifting scenes to explore contemporary feminism at the crossroads of the East and West, as well as broader historical narratives and notions of the body and performance. Eviner's goal for Runaway Girls is to explore the dreams, stories, and fears of girls who have either chosen to run away or were forced to leave their communities, living on the edge of society in Turkey and beyond. Unfolding in a warehouse that is under construction, the film presents fragmented scenes in which gender-ambiguous figures, whose faces are obscured by mysterious drawings, dance, struggle, and chase one another before an endlessly rotating camera. In this video the state of drawing in her practice takes on new dimensions. Eviner says that in Runaway Girls, "drawings take the place of actors and become involved in the story. Drawings demand to be free. They want to tear themselves from the paper."
Curated by Brett Littman, Executive Director.
The production of İnci Eviner: Runaway Girls is made possible by SAHA Association, Istanbul and Sarah Peter.
Image: İnci Eviner, Still from Runaway Girls, HD Video loop, surround sound system. Copyright İnci Eviner 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nev, Istanbul.
Portraits from the École des Beaux-Arts Paris
The Drawing Center has commissioned artists Ryan and Trevor Oakes to use the exhibition Portraits from the École des Beaux-Arts Paris as a platform to further explore the genre of portraiture.
For eight consecutive Thursdays during May 7–June 25th, 2015 from 12–8 PM, the artists will be in residence in our Main Gallery. Please click here for details of how you can participate.
This exhibition explores four hundred years of portrait drawings, emphasizing work from live models. Each week, a different set of four portraits from different centuries and with different formal qualities will be hung "in dialogue" with each other in a specially-built room located in the center of The Drawing Center's Main Gallery. Forty portraits have been chosen from the Beaux-Arts de Paris' collection based on diverse criteria such as the male and female gestures, caricature, frontal gaze, social class, and profession of the model. The room is inspired by the intimate gallery at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome where Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X (c.1649) hangs, which only accommodates a small number of visitors at a time and was designed to provide a space for close viewing and contemplation without crowds. The remaining thirty-six portraits in the exhibition will be hung on the gallery's back wall and will be visible to the visitor throughout the exhibition's run.
This unique exhibition will explore the notion of drawn portraiture and provide alternative readings of this important genre of art making within a contemporary context. The selection of works is extensive, ranging from seventeenth-century to the present. Highlights include never-before-exhibited drawings by nineteenth-century luminaries Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Charles Garnier to the work of modern and contemporary masters Henri Matisse and Georg Baselitz to portraits by recent graduates of the Beaux-Arts de Paris.
Co-curated by Emmanuelle Brugerolles, Curator of the Drawings collection at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and Brett Littman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center.
Lead support for Portraits from the École des Beaux-Arts comes from Canson. Additional support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Robert Lehman Foundation, Ildeko and Gilbert Butler, Catherine and Arthur Williams, Diane Nixon, David Tobey, Elizabeth Eveillard, the Kress Family Foundation, and Jill Newhouse.
Image: Jacob Ferdinand Voet, Portrait de femme vue de face, 1639-1700, Colored pencil on blue paper. 22.5 X 16 cm
Open Sessions 3
Open Sessions continues with artist-directed group exhibitions. The third Open Sessions group show features artists who work with language, objects, narration, and performance: Becky Brown, Ernesto Caivano, Annette Cords, Steffani Jemison, Nyeema Morgan, Zach Rockhill, and Jina Valentine. The exhibition is organized by a shelving system that encircles the entire space, and includes artworks alongside art ephemera, books, and household objects.
Will you stay home, please? This blade of grass is positively, miraculously, familiar. Stealing first base…!? A veritable, infinity of obstacles between here and— The last ephemeral boon of untruthful clearings is perfect nowhere. Original obstacles entrenched in chaparral; pervasive, go haywire. A singular event, methodically set forth, laid plain many paths across a desolate landscape …and when "an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?" The complexity of oceans beams from an irreducible glitter.
–Co-authored text by Open Sessions 3 artists, based on Surrealist language game.
Organized by the artists and by Nova Benway and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions Curators.
Image: Ernesto Caivano, Codex 08.16.2013.I, 2014 (detail), Graphite on paper, 10 x 7 inches, Courtesy of the artist.
Tomi Ungerer: All in One
Tomi Ungerer is best known as the award winning author and illustrator of such beloved 1960s children's classics as The Three Robbers (1961) and Moon Man (1966). But the virtuoso draftsman—who was born in Alsace, France, in 1931, and who currently resides in a remote part of Ireland near Cork—is much more than this. Even as Ungerer was busy producing children's books for the publisher Harper & Row, he was making a name for himself with witty advertising campaigns for the New York Times and the Village Voice, biting satirical illustrations about the business world, and brutal pictorial responses to racism, fascism, and the Vietnam War. Ungerer also made graphic erotic drawings throughout his career. That Ungerer is not as well known in America today as he is in Europe is largely due to his self-imposed exile c.1970, when he and his wife abruptly abandoned New York and relocated to a farm in Nova Scotia, where Ungerer produced some of his most exquisite drawings to date.
The Drawing Center exhibition is the first career retrospective in the United States dedicated to this extraordinary artist. Beginning with his childhood drawings depicting the Nazi invasion of Strasbourg, through his work in New York and Canada, and concluding with Ungerer's most recent political and satirical campaigns as well as his illustrations for the 2013 children's book Fog Island, Tomi Ungerer: All in One will re-introduce this wildly creative individual to New York City and the world. The exhibition will occupy the entire Drawing Center, with a spotlight "exhibition" of Ungerer's erotic drawings in the Drawing Room and animations in the lower-level Lab gallery.
Curated by Claire Gilman, Curator.
Tomi Ungerer: All in One is made possible by the support of Phaidon Press, Lisa Silver and Jean Castelli, an anonymous gift in honor of Frances Beatty Adler, the Maurice Sendak Foundation, EDF Group, Philippe Castagnet, HarperCollins, Dominque Formhals, Fiona and Eric Rudin, the French Embassy, and L'école des Loisirs.
Special thanks to the Musée Tomi Ungerer-Centre international de l'illustration
ARTFORUM - Review
THE NEW YORKER - Tomi Ungerer's Triumpant Return
THE PARIS REVIEW - An Interview with Tomi Ungerer
See more press clips on TomiUngerer.com
Image: Tomi Ungerer, Untitled, 1961 (drawing for The Three Robbers). Collage of cut paper, gouache, and marker on paper, 11 3/4 x 9 1/4 inches. Image courtesy of the Children's Literature Research Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia.
Xanti Schawinsky
Head Drawings and Faces of War
Xanti Scawinsky: Head Drawings and Faces of War was on view at Bergen Kunsthall in Bergen, Norway from January 8 through February 28, 2016. This exhibition was on view at The Drawing Center from September 19 - December 14, 2014.
Xanti Schawinsky: Head Drawings and Faces of War is a look at first generation Bauhaus artist Alexander 'Xanti' Schawinsky's prolific oeuvre, which encompasses a range of social and political investigations. Schawinsky played a key role in the school's vital social life and was a member of the Bauhaus Band. He studied graphic design and experimental photography and was also deeply engaged in the Bauhaus's theater workshop as an actor, set and costume designer, creator of performances, and teacher.
The exhibition focuses on two bodies of work Schawinsky made between 1941 and 1946, Faces of War and the Head Drawings. The former are man-machine hybrids that could represent either an aggressive enemy or a powerful avenger—or perhaps an identity that encompasses both. The Faces of War break from the utopian optimism of the early Bauhaus and reveal the existential struggle of an artist coping with identity and the devastation of war. The Head Drawings allowed Schawinsky to literally remake his own "portrait" out of such detritus of the natural world as thread, crystals, rope, and rocks.
Curated by Brett Littman, Executive Director.
Xanti Schawinsky: Head Drawings and Faces of War is made possible by the support of The Kind World Foundation, the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Daniel Schawinsky and the Xanti Schawinsky Estate, and Fiona and Eric Rudin.
Special thanks to Anke Kempkes and BROADWAY 1602.
Read Drawing Papers 119: Xanti Schawinsky: Head Drawings and Faces of War.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Xanti Schawinsky, The Warrior (Faces of War), 1942. Mixed media, watercolor and black pen on paper. 29 x 21 3/8 inches (73.7 X 54.2 cm). Courtesy of The Xanti Schawinsky Estate and BROADWAY 1602.
Open Sessions 2
Open Sessions continues with artist-directed group exhibitions and public programs.
New work including a collaborative film on fairy tales and politics; an installation under the stairs; a stack of posters in envelopes, ready to be mailed; a comic book for reconciliation; drawings of movie cameras, and of films; Morse code messages; and other new work. Participating artists: Joey Fauerso, Tatiana Istomina, Patte Loper, Matt Neff, Mona Sharma, Adam Shecter, Naho Taruishi, and Arturs Virtmanis.
Many Worlds is a collaborative folio project developed by Matt Neff and Adam Shecter, consisting of an edition of prints from each artist in Open Sessions 2. At The Drawing Center, visitors are invited to fill out an address label in the gallery and a print will be mailed to the address of their choosing. Each print is sealed into an envelope printed with fragments of the editioned images.
Mona Sharma's After "A" is a comic book made by the artist for her best friend. Sharma loves this friend very much, who nevertheless has an extraordinary talent for making their relationship unbearably painful. Sharma's friend has always had an unusual obsession with Archie Comics; this comic book, which will be the first in a series, is a collection of their personal stories that they both can look back at whenever times get tough.
Arturs Virmanis's WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT!? is a sinking vessel, filled heavy with hopes, adrift in a sea of cryptic messages: a tragic wall of Morse code-like dots and lines (the building blocks of drawing), and scrolls of obscure texts. Everything is steeped in messianism, melancholia and black carbon dust. It is a vaudevillian show that casts disparate and unwilling characters like Fernando Pessoa, with his ever-unfinished scribbles on melancholia; Piranesi, with his albums of romantically etched ruins of Rome; Morse, with his messianic aspirations; and fairy tales of pirates and their castaway ships… Save Our Ships, Save Our Souls…
Naho Taruishi's Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince depicts the patent of the first motion camera. The inventor, Le Prince, mysteriously vanished shortly before his creation was unveiled to the public. Correspondingly, drawn images of the films Ugetsu Monogatari - 96 minutes and The Woman in the Dunes emerge from the surreal experiences of characters in each film after they depart from their daily existences. Together the drawings evoke disappearances in real and fictional stories.
Matt Neff's Untitled is made from a discarded incubator that takes on the abstracted sculptural image of a lifeless form on the ground, flooded by the muddled lights of both the police and the community's protests, and is a reflection of the ongoing struggle in Ferguson, Missouri. Untitled is visually inspired by Neff's Cage Variation toner drawings, which he began several years ago and has continued to revisit through drawing, print, and now sculpture.
Scary Stories is an evolving archive of oral and visual narratives recorded and edited by artists Tatiana Istomina and Joey Fauerso. Participants are invited to first talk about what is "scary" in their own lives or in the life of the society as a whole, and then create drawings in response to the stories of others. Beginning with the artists' own communities in San Antonio and New York City, Scary Stories explores how personal narratives reflect the collective concepts of danger and fearfulness among different social and cultural groups. With plans to expand the archive by recording in multiple locations nationally and internationally, Scary Stories fosters conversations between individuals and larger communities on the definitions and incarnations of fear, and creates the basis for mutual empathy and understanding through the fundamental acts of drawing and storytelling. Open Sessions 2 presents a selection of short films based on the stories and drawings recorded by Fauerso and Istomina in San Antonio and New York. The artists will be working in a recording room at the back of the gallery throughout the show, conducting interviews with visitors to the museum and documenting their stories and drawings. To sign up for an interview, please email artists at email@example.com.
Patte Loper's After Lebbeus: A Model for Drawing responds to the architecture of the Lab at The Drawing Center. It has been built intuitively, without a plan, using a language of experimental architecture inspired by Lebbeus Woods, whose drawings were exhibited by The Drawing Center in 2013. Loper will draw the built form from observation at set times during the exhibition, leaving the drawings behind as part of the installation.
Image: Mona Sharma, After "A", (detail), 2014, 5 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches (19 by 14 cm). Image courtesy of the artist.
Thread Lines
This group exhibition features sixteen artists who engage in sewing, knitting, and weaving to create a wide-range of works that activate the expressive and conceptual potential of line and illuminate affinities between the mediums of textile and drawing. Multi-generational in scope, Thread Lines brings together those pioneers who—challenging entrenched modernist hierarchies—first unraveled the distinction between textile and art with a new wave of contemporary practitioners who have inherited and expanded upon their groundbreaking gestures.
Curated by Joanna Kleinberg Romanow, Assistant Curator.
List of Participating Artists: Mónica Bengoa (b. 1969, Santiago, Chile), Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911, Paris, France- d. 2010, New York, NY), Sheila Hicks (b. 1934, Hastings, NE), Ellen Lesperance (b. 1971, Minneapolis, MN), Kimsooja (b. 1957, Taegu, Korea), Beryl Korot (b. 1945, New York, NY), Maria Lai (b. 1919, Ulassai, Sardinia- d. 2013, Cardedu, Sardinia), Sam Moyer (b. 1983, Chicago, IL), William J. O'Brien (b. 1975, Eastlake, OH), Robert Otto Epstein (b. 1979, Pittsburgh, PA), Jessica Rankin (b. 1971, Sydney, Australia), Elaine Reichek (b. 1943, New York, NY), Drew Shiflett (b. 1951, Chicago, IL), Alan Shields (b. 1944, Herington, KS- d. 2005, Shelter Island, NY), Lenore Tawney (b. 1907, Lorain, OH- d. 2007, New York, NY), and Anne Wilson (b. 1949, Detroit, MI).
Anne Wilson's To Cross (Walking New York), 2014 in the Main Gallery
Performance Times here.
After discovering that The Drawing Center's SoHo building was originally built in 1866 for the Positive Motion Loom Company, Chicago-based artist Anne Wilson conceived of her latest site-specific performance that will use the main gallery's four central columns as a weaving loom. Recalling the physical structure and operations of the loom itself, the piece's four participants "walk" around the twelve foot columns, carrying a spool of thread to form a standard weaving cross (a method used to keep warp threads in order). The durational performance, which takes place over the course of two months, will result in the fabrication of a five by thirty-four foot sculpture: a colorful cross composed of innumerable strands of thread.
Kimsooja's Thread Routes - Chapter I, 2010 in The Lab
On view September 18 – October 2, Wednesday-Sunday
Korean artist Kimsooja premieres the first in a series of six 16mm films that document the performative elements of varied forms of indigenous textile construction. Thread Routes - Chapter I, 2010 explores the Peruvian weaving culture set amid the highlands of Machu Picchu.
The New York Times review
Thread Lines is made possible by the support of Richloom Fabrics Group, Fiona and Eric Rudin, Daniel Romanow, The Capital Group, the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, Ambach & Rice, Galería Isabel Aninat, and Lesley Heller.
Read Drawing Papers 118: Thread Lines
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 2006, Fabric, 15 x 22 1/4 inches. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Sari Dienes
Sari Dienes is the first museum show ever devoted to the artist. In the early 1950s, Sari Dienes used experimental processes to create bold works on paper, impressing into her pictorial support the gritty and vibrant terrain of New York City's streets. Her transfer drawings of subway grates, sidewalks, and manhole covers produced images that were at once abstract patterns and highly recognizable subjects. Armed with an ink roller, she mapped her urban haunts as well as her body's movement; uneven and ghostly skeins of pigment document her repetitive application of a standard-size brayer across the surface. Dienes placed drawing at the center of her practice while simultaneously challenging traditionally held views about the medium. The eight works and associated ephemera included in this exhibition were produced between 1953 and 1955, the most intensive period of the artist's process-based experimentation. These drawings had a profound formal, technical, and iconographic impact on a young generation of artists, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. While widely exhibited and well–received at the time of its creation, her work has been largely overlooked in recent decades. This exhibition highlights her practice and sheds new light on her legacy.
Curated by Alexis Lowry Murray and Delia Solomons.
Sari Dienes is made possible by the support of Fiona and Eric Rudin and Pavel Zoubok Gallery.
Image: Sari Dienes, Woodblock VI (Artist's proof Yaddo), 1953. Ink on rice paper, 19 x 18 inches. Courtesy Sari Dienes Foundation, Pomona, NY. © Sari Dienes Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Read Sari Dienes Lab gallery brochure.
Alexis Rockman
Drawings from Life of Pi
Alexis Rockman: Drawings from Life of Pi travels to New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) where it will be on view July 4 - October 12, 2014.
Alexis Rockman's watercolor drawings were the first stage in the development of the fantastical, imaginary world of Life of Pi, the 2012 Academy-Award winning feature film directed by Ang Lee. Lee sought out Rockman's vision as an artist with a specific commitment to hand drawing to bring a human scale to the project, a sense of the material and the fortuitous that would come, for example, from the random bloom of watercolor pigment on paper. Though most artistic contributions to cinema are dependent on photo-realism or cartoon-like illustration, Rockman's images are fluid, intimate, and dynamic in a way that only drawing can capture. The exhibition will provide The Drawing Center with a unique opportunity to explore the relationship between visual art—specifically drawing—and commercial filmmaking.
Curated by Brett Littman and Nova Benway.
This exhibition was on view at The Drawing Center September 27-November 3, 2013.
Read Drawing Papers 107: Alexis Rockman: Drawings from Life of Pi.
Buy the catalogue.
The Intuitionists
The Intuitionists is a collaborative artist project inspired by Colson Whitehead's 1999 novel of the same name—a work of speculative fiction that explores the relationships between progress, technology, and difference. The exhibition considers how the collection, the database, and the aggregate serve as complementary models for the organization of information and objects in flux. Deploying an innovative and idiosyncratic selection process that matches the phrases from a single paragraph of Whitehead's book to keywords that organize The Drawing Center's Viewing Program database (e.g. "autobiographical," "geometric," "historical," "consumer culture," etc.), the artists Heather Hart, Steffani Jemison, and Jina Valentine have invited over sixty members of the Viewing Program to submit artworks responding to a word or phrase from the novel. Each item in the exhibition is hung according to the sequence determined by Whitehead's text. The Lab gallery features a collaboration by Hart, Jemison, and Valentine, also inspired by their chosen paragraph from the novel, using its words and letters to form an interpretive drawing.
The artists in The Intuitionist are: Shaun Acton, Valerio Berruti, A.J. Bocchino, Dana Boussard, Hannah Burr, Maria Bussman, Enrique Chagoya, Joyce Chan, Catalina Chervin, Hannah Cole, Kenny Cole, Vincent Colvin, Hollis Cooper, Cui Fei, Gabriel Delgado, Wendy DesChene, Asya Dodina and Slava Polishchuk, Debra Drexler, Derek Dunlop, Elisabeth Eberle, Lisa Endriss, Rodney Ewing, Tory Fair, Douglas Florian, Nicholas Fraser, Carl Fudge, Brett Goodroad, Barry Gray, Stephen Grossman, Nathan Haenlein, Patrick Earl Hammie, Skowmon Hastanan, HENSE, Elizabeth Hoak-Doering, Cynthia Ona Innis, Tatiana Istomina, Hedwige Jacobs, Chiaki Kamikawa, Manfred Kirschner, Kimia Kline, Nicholas Knight, Kang Joo Lee, Kate Tessa Lee, Cynthia Lin, Hung Liu, Maess, Mario Marzan, Linn Meyers, Nyeema Morgan, Paul Morrison, Seamus Liam O'Brien, Alison Owen, Jenny Perlin, Mel Prest, Jo Ann Rothschild, Anna Schachte, Fausto Sevila, Jill Shoffiet, Thomas Slaughter, Chris Spinelli, Karen Tam, Caroline Tavelli-Abar, Scott Teplin, Jen Urso, Kris Van Dessel, Kara Walker, and Margaret Withers.
Organized by Heather Hart, Steffani Jemison, and Jina Valentine. Curated by Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions Curator.
The Intuitionists is made possible by the support of The Evelyn Toll Family Foundation and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Read Drawing Papers 116: The Intuitionists.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Nyeema Morgan, Like It Is: Prelude, 2014. Variable. Courtesy of the artist.
This group exhibition features a selection of international contemporary artists who adopt an intimate format to explore issues related to visual perception, personal and historical memory, the construction of gender stereotypes, and the power of the imagination. In an age when cavernous galleries and outsized images and objects suggest that bigger is necessarily better, working small carries a certain risk. It is a risk, however, that the nine artists in the exhibition are willing to take as they create minute worlds that absorb the viewer while resisting possession. The selected works range from graphite photo-realist renderings to interventions in found objects to site-specific installations, including a custom-made tabletop bearing microscopic figurations and a postage-stamp-sized watercolor inserted directly into the gallery wall. The artists in Small. are: Firelei Báez (b. 1981, Santiago de los Trenta Caballeros, Dominican Republic), Emmanouil Bitsakis (b. 1974, Athens, Greece), Paul Chiappe (b. 1984, Kircady, Scotland), Claire Harvey (b. 1976, United Kingdom), Tom Molloy, (b. 1964, Waterford, Ireland), Rita Ponce de León (b. 1982, Lima, Peru), Peggy Preheim (b. 1963, Yankton, SD), James Sheehan (b. 1964, San Francisco, CA), and Tinus Vermeersch (b. 1976, Belgium).
Curated by Claire Gilman, Curator, and Joanna Kleinberg Romanow, Assistant Curator.
Small. is made possible by the support of Fiona and Eric Rudin, Irene Panagopoulos, Ignacio Liprandi Arte Contemporáneo, Lora Reynolds Gallery, and Steve Shane.
Read Drawing Papers 117: Small.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Paul Chiappe, Untitled 48, 2010. Pencil on paper, 5 5/16 x 6 7/64 inches. Collection Lea Weingarten.
Lebbeus Woods
Acknowledging the parallels between society's physical and psychological constructions, architect Lebbeus Woods has depicted a career-long narrative of how these constructions transform our being. Working mostly, but not exclusively, with pencil on paper, Woods has created an oeuvre of complex worlds—at times abstract and at times explicit—that present shifts, cycles, repetitions within the built environment. His timeless architecture is not in a particular style or in response to a singular moment in the field; rather, it offers an opportunity to consider how built forms impact the individual and the collective, and reflect contemporary political, social and ideological conditions, and how one person contributes to the development and mutation of the built world. Lebbeus Woods, Architect brings together works from the past forty years by one of the most influential designers working in architecture. Beyond architects, he has been hailed by designers, filmmakers, writers, and artists as a significant voice in recent history, his works resonate across many disciplines for their conceptual depth, imaginative breadth, lasting beauty and ethical potency. The exhibition centers on transformation as a recurring theme, providing a framework for understanding the experimental nature of the work.
This exhibition originated at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and will be on view at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, November 22 through March 2, 2014.
Lebbeus Woods, Architect is curated by Joseph Becker, Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, and Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, Helen Hilton Raiser Associate Curator of Architecture and Design, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Lebbeus Woods, Architect is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The exhibition at The Drawing Center is made possible by the generous support of Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown, Steven Holl + 32BNY, Edward Cella Art + Architecture, Friedman Benda, and Stéphane Samuel and Robert Melvin Rubin. Additional support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Special thanks to the Estate of Lebbeus Woods.
The media sponsor is The Architect's Newspaper.
Read Drawing Papers 114: Lebbeus Woods, Architect.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Lebbeus Woods, Photon Kite, from the series Centricity, 1988, Graphite on paper, 24 in. x 22 inches, Purchase through a gift of the Members of the Architecture + Design Forum, SFMOMA Architecture and Design Accessions Committee, and the architecture and design community in honor of Aaron Betsky, Curator of Architecture, Design and Digital Projects, 1995-2001, © Estate of Lebbeus Woods.
Len Lye
Motion Sketch
Len Lye's career was marked by a lifelong fascination with movement and an aspiration to compose motion; the movement of the drawing hand was an important touchstone for his works in various media. In New York Lye is now well known for his animated experimental films. In the 1920s, however, Lye began to make what he termed "motion sketches"; abstract drawings that attempted to render the movement of his subjects, rather than their appearance. Motion Sketch reintroduces scholars and audiences in New York to Lye's multidimensional practice specifically in relation to drawing. Describing his drawing practice in his own carefree prose, Lye said that doodling "cultivates a vacuous seaweed-pod state of kelp as a skull which is attached to a pencil betwixt the arm and the fingers held doodling in turn 'twixt you and the paper in a rather bemused, empty, harmonious state of an attitude, eyes periphering said paper." Lye's kinesthetic approach to drawing—related to Surrealist automatism and anticipating aspects of Abstract Expressionism—also informed his practice in painting, photography, film and sculpture. Not limited to works on paper; the exhibition will instead reveal how Lye's concept of "doodling" underpinned his approach to much of his work.
The exhibtion will include a selection of paintings, drawings, and photograms, never before seen in the United States. In The Drawing Center's Lab gallery, an extensive film program will be presented on video, including such landmark films as Tusalava, 1929; A Colour Box, 1935; and Free Radicals, 1957/1979.
Len Lye: Motion Sketch is curated by Gregory Burke, Executive Director/CEO of both the Mendel Art Gallery and Remai Art Gallery of Saskatchewan and Co-Curator of the Montreal Biennale, 2014; and Tyler Cann, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Columbus Museum of Art. This exhibition is presented by The Drawing Center in collaboration with the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (New Plymouth, New Zealand) and draws primarily from the Len Lye Foundation Collection.
Len Lye: Motion Sketchis made possible with the support of Creative New Zealand. All Souls Carnival (1957). Courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation. From material preserved and made available by the New Zealand Archive Ngā Kaitiaki O Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua. Courtesy of of thee Museum of Modern Art. Digital version by Park Road Post Production and Weta Digital Ltd. Tusalava, (1929); Rainbow Dance (1936); Trade Tattoo (1937); Colour Flight (1938); Courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation. From material preserved and made available by the New Zealand Archive Ngā Kaitiaki O Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua. Free Radicals (1958/1979); Tal Farlow (1980); Particles in Space (1980). Courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation. From material preserved and made available by the New Zealand Archive Ngā Kaitiaki O Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua. Digital version by Park Road Post Production and Weta Digital Ltd. A Colour Box (1935). Courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation. From material preserved by the BFI National Archive and made available by the New Zealand Film Archive Ngā Kaitiaki O Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua.
Read Drawing Papers 115: Len Lye: Motion Sketch.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Len Lye, Drawing for Head Man of the Seed World, c. 1930, Ink on paper, 10 3/5 x 8 3/10 inches, Courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation Collection, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.
Open Sessions
"verisimilitude without realistic rendering" - Eleanor Aldrich
"choreographed processes…. the act of pouring" - Andrew Ross
"systems of classification: military insignia, ornamental patterns, scientific diagrams"- Derek Dunlop
"the use of charcoal to insert and inscribe bodily action…" - Yara Pina
"a visitor may press gold leaf onto my images in exchange for a wish." - Heather Hart
"transforming the paper into a physical and structural form" - Lauren Seiden
"dualities - nature/culture, organic/inorganic, abstraction/representation - break down" - Barbara Weissberger
The Open Sessions exhibition will feature the work of Eleanor Aldrich, Derek Dunlop, Heather Hart, Yara Pina, Andrew Ross, Lauren Seiden, and Barbara Weissberger.
A closing reception will be held Sunday, March 23, from 4-6pm.
ACTION + OBJECT + EXCHANGE is the first exhibition of Open Sessions, a two-year program with over fifty artists working in a variety of disciplines. It offers exhibition opportunities in The Drawing Center's Lab Space and other outside venues, as well as studio visits, public programs, and informal gatherings. The program is organized by Open Sessions Curators Nova Benway and Lisa Sigal and the participating artists, with support from Open Sessions Fellows Kamrooz Aram, Nathan Carter, Emilie Clark, and E.V. Day.
Open Sessions is made possible by Faber-Castell and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Special thanks to Triangle Arts Association, which supports emerging and mid-career international and U.S. visual artists.
Andrea Bowers and Suzanne Lacy
Drawing Lessons
Please click here from March 17-23 for the daily Drawing Lesson schedule.
It is time artist Suzanne Lacy learns to draw, and in this nine-day installation at The Drawing Center, artist Andrea Bowers will attempt to rectify this essential artistic illiteracy in Lacy's oeuvre. Andrea Bowers and Suzanne Lacy: Drawing Lessons will consist of drawing lessons provided by Bowers over the course of nine days as a platform for conversations; resultant drawings; video projection; and the installation of the lesson environment—lights, platform, drawing easels, etc. As they work together under scrutiny of the audience, Bowers and Lacy will explore in work and conversation questions they engage with in their practices in general. For example: what are the roles and problematics of representation in public practice art? How do artists reconcile activist and field-based practices with the necessities of production for gallery and museum? What is the relationship between second and third wave Feminism? What is the role of venue, object, and style in the identification, historification, and evaluation of art? As this is an intensive and actual attempt to teach Lacy to draw, lessons will last four hours per day with drawing practice in between sessions for a total of six hours per day.
Produced by Claire Gilman, Curator and Nova Benway, Curatorial Assistant.
If you are interested in bringing a group to observe the performance, please contact Kate Robinson, our Visitor Services Manager, at firstname.lastname@example.com, or call 212-219-2166. Admission fees are $5 for adults, $3 for students. For this exhibition we will offer a ticket to visitors allowing free return visits to the performance. We will be open every day of the performance, Monday – Sunday 12-6pm, Thursday 12-8pm, including days The Drawing Center would normally be closed. Please note that the artists will take unscheduled performance breaks throughout the day; the installation will be visible continuously throughout open hours.
Andrea Bowers and Suzanne Lacy: Drawing Lessons is made possible through the generous support of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation's Artistic Innovation and Collaboration Program, which supports risk-taking and innovative collaborations in the spirit of Robert Rauschenberg.
Taxidermy and other props generously provided by Creel and Gow, and The Evolution Store.
Image: Suzanne Lacy with text by Arlene Raven, Travels With Mona, Europe, Latin America, Mexico, Southwest United States and San Francisco, 1977-78. Courtesy the artist.
Rashaad Newsome
FIVE (The Drawing Center)
Please note, the performance will take place on Thursday, March 6 at 6:30pm. The event is free, but an RSVP is needed. THIS EVENT IS NOW FULLY BOOKED.
FIVE (The Drawing Center) is a multimedia performance that highlights the art of vogue, a dance form characterized by angular and linear body movements inspired by the stylized poses of high fashion models on the catwalk and in the pages of magazines. As Newsome's work illuminates, it also evokes a number of qualities long associated with the medium of drawing: the latter's emphasis on repeated gestures; its mapping of time and space. New York-based vogue dancers and musicians, including renowned opera singer, Stefanos Koroneos, and distinguished Vogue Commentator, Kevin Jz Prodigy, will perform and be conducted by Newsome. For FIVE (The Drawing Center), Newsome uses cutting edge technology to challenge the ephemeral nature of live performance by transforming the dancers' movements into unique line drawings. In addition to the evening performance, video documentation from FIVE (ARTHK), originally performed at the 2012 Hong Kong International Art Fair, will be exhibited as well as five multi-colored, line drawings produced using motion-tracking software from that performance.
Produced by Joanna Kleinberg Romanow.
Rashaad Newsome: FIVE (The Drawing Center) is made possible through the generous support of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation's Artistic Innovation and Collaboration Program, which supports risk-taking and innovative collaborations in the spirit of Robert Rauschenberg.
Special thanks to Galerie Henrik Springmann, Berlin.
Read Drawing Papers 112: Rashaad Newsome: FIVE (The Drawing Center).
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Rashaad Newsome, FIVE (ARTHK), 2012, Video still from the live performance.
Deborah Grant
Christ You Know it Ain't Easy!!
For the past decade, artist Deborah Grant has interwoven historical accounts and personal experiences with references to contemporary political and social issues in her ongoing series Random Select. Grant culls material from a variety of sources including magazine photographs, comic books, published texts, and art historical reference books which she masterfully translates and brings together via her signature drawing method to create highly personal, non-linear narratives that investigate politics, race, and cultural identity. Grant's Christ You Know it Ain't Easy!! (the installation takes its title from the Lennon/McCartney song "The Ballad of John and Yoko") combines painting, drawing, and collage to recount the fictional meeting between African-American folk artist Mary A. Bell and renowned modernist painter Henri Matisse. Mary A. Bell (1873–1941), a deeply devout Catholic domestic servant who produced over a hundred drawings after she had retired from service, never received formal artistic training. Rendered through graphic silhouettes, intricate line drawings, and collaged photographic elements, Grant's fictionalized narrative provides an alternate account of the legacy of modernist painting, one not told in the history books.
Curated by Claire Gilman.
Deborah Grant: Christ You Know it Ain't Easy!! is made possible in part by Steve Turner and Victoria Dailey, Monroe Denton, Dee and Gianna Kerrison, and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn.
Read Drawing Papers 111: Deborah Grant: Christ You Know it Ain't Easy!!
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Deborah Grant, Detail from God's Voice in the Midnight Hours, 2013. Oil, archival ink, enamel, paper, Arches W.C. paper, linen, and birch wood on 24 panels, 24 x 18 x 1 1/2 inches each. Courtesy the artist and Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles.
Ferran Adrià
Notes on Creativity
Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity begins an international tour at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, OH, September 26, 2014 - January 18, 2015 followed by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, February 28 - August 2, 2015; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN, Sept 17, 2015 - January 3, 2016; and Marres House for Contemporary Culture, Maastricht, The Netherlands, March 20 - June 12, 2016. This exhibition was on view at The Drawing Center January 25 - February 28, 2014
Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity is the first major museum exhibition to focus on the visualization and drawing practices of master chef Ferran Adrià. The exhibition emphasizes the role of drawing in Adrià's quest to understand creativity. His complex body of work positions the medium as both a philosophical tool—used to organize and convey knowledge, meaning, and signification-—as well as a physical object—used to synthesize over twenty years of innovation in the kitchen. As one of the most important avant-garde chefs of the twenty-first century, Adrià pushes culinary boundaries with both knowledge and wit, transforming the art of cooking into an art of food. Hundreds of notebooks have been filled with concepts, ideas, collaged photographs, and loose sketches for new dishes for elBulli. More straightforward creative methods in the form of lists, tables of ingredients, and cooking methods have also been used to synthesize ingredients and conceptualize new ways of cooking. The use of drawing to articulate cuisine as both a product and a concept is indicative of a creative model that is always in flux. Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity charts the origins of this innovator's intellectual and philosophical ideas about gastronomy that have forever changed how we understand food.
Curated by Brett Littman.
Dom Pérignon is the presenting partner of Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity.
Additional support is provided by the Institut Ramon Llull, Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), and Lavazza.
Special thanks to The James New York.
The New York Times review
"If his cooking is close to art, then Mr. Adrià is close enough to being an artist to merit the exuberant, engrossing overview of the graphic side of his work at the Drawing Center."
''Several drawings bring to mind the lists and diagrams frequent to early Conceptual Art. And three elaborate charts enlarged and transferred to walls map the creative, culinary and gastronomical process with the inspirational verve of a Joseph Beuys blackboard.
In contrast, for "Theory of Culinary Evolution," Mr. Adrià uses crayon, paint stick and colored pencil on typing-paper-size sheets to trace the evolution of food from the Big Bang, through the discovery of fire and forward, in 58 colorful, childlike drawings that bring to mind aspects of the work of Joan Snyder and Cy Twombly.''
- Roberta Smith, The New York Times
Read Drawing Papers 110: Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Ferran Adrià, Plating Diagram. Ink on paper, 11x17 inches, Courtesy of elBullifoundation.
Pencil Sketches
This show brings together Emily Dickinson's original poem manuscripts and Robert Walser's microscripts for the first time in an art museum setting. Although Walser, who was born shortly before Dickinson died, was most likely unaware of her work, both writers were obsessively private as well as peculiarly attentive to the visuality of their texts. Walser wrote in tiny, inscrutable script on narrow strips of paper using an antiquated German alphabet that was long considered indecipherable. Only recently have these scripts been shown to consist of early drafts of the author's published texts. Similarly, Dickinson fitted her multifarious poetic fragments to carefully torn pieces of envelope or stationery, which were discovered among her posthumous papers. (W. B. Sebald once referred to Walser as a "clairvoyant of the small," and this description might apply to Dickinson as well.) In both cases, the form of these texts affects the language itself as both writers crafted their words in response to the form at hand. Rarely in literature has the manner in which words are made been so integral to the way in which they might be read. The Dickinson/ Walser exhibition, which proposes the notion that art may be used to make language, is a fitting corollary to Drawing Time, Reading Time, which appears concurrently in the Main Gallery.
Curated by Claire Gilman.
The New York Times review
"Together, the two exhibitions prompt mind-stretching reflection on the complicated relations between writing, communication and reality." - The New York Times
Dickinson/Walser: Pencil Sketches is made possible by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Consulate General of Switzerland in New York, and New York Coucil for the Humanities.
Read Drawing Papers 109: Dickinson/Walser: Pencil Sketches.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Emily Dickinson, We Talked With Each Other About Each Other, c. 1879, Amherst Manuscript #514. Pencil on Envelope, 1 sheet, 5 1/10 x 7 9/10 inches (13 x 20 cm). Courtesy The Emily Dickinson Collection, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections.
Drawing Time, Reading Time
This exhibition is organized simultaneously with Marking Language at Drawing Room, London (October 10–December 14, 2013) and a joint publication will be produced.
This show features an international group of artists spanning the 1960s to today, all of whom are engaged in exploring the relationship between drawing and writing as distinct yet interrelated gestures. Now commonplace, visual art's preoccupation with language had its roots in an unexpected linguistic turn circa 1960, when artists sought to recover a direct, sensory experience of the world. Paradoxically, language became a favored tool in this effort as artists such as Dan Graham, Mel Bochner, and Hanne Darboven manipulated the written text in an effort to evacuate predictable meaning and uncover the materiality of language. The exhibition considers a different path, one that emerged simultaneously with Conceptual Art but that embraced language in art as a means of questioning the written word's communicative transparency on the one hand and visual art's material opacity on the other. Challenging modernism's longstanding effort to purge art of narrative association in favor of material and conceptual self-sufficiency, the artists in the exhibition pursue a hybrid aesthetic that privileges incompletion.
Curated by Claire Gilman.
Artists include Carl Andre, Pavel Büchler, Guy de Cointet, Mirtha Dermisache, Sean Landers, Allen Ruppersberg, Nina Papaconstantinou, Deb Sokolow, and Molly Springfield.
The New York Times review
"Together, the two exhibitions prompt mind-stretching reflection on the complicated relations between writing, communication and reality." - The New York Times
Drawing Time, Reading Time is made possible by the very generous support of Sarah Peter, Agnes Gund, anonymous, HRH Princess Firyal of Jordan, Kathleen Irvin Loughlin, Frank Williams, Karen Zukowski and David Diamond, Irene Panagopoulos, Gil Shiva, The Felix & Elizabeth Rohatyn Foundation, Amanda Foreman and Jonathan Barton, and Morris A. Orden.
The exhibition catalogue is made possible by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colombia.
Read Drawing Papers 108: Drawing Time, Reading Time.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Allen Ruppersberg, Untitled (The Book as Object), 1976, Pencil on paper, 21 1/4 x 27 3/16 inches (54 x 69 cm) Collection of C. Christine Nichols.
William Engelen
PLEASE NOTE: The Opening Reception will take place on Thursday, November 21 from 6-8pm. See details here.
William Engelen's latest works, Falten [Folds], is an exhibition of a new series of musical scores for percussion by the Berlin-based artist. Falten [Folds] build musical compositions from folded paper. At the start of each composition, Engelen draws a time line on a sheet of paper. Each centimeter of paper corresponds to one second in the score. The artist shapes the paper into three-dimensional forms—ovals, cones, or even knots. He then hand-draws a staff notation on the sections of the paper that are not hidden in the folds. Through this structure of creases and lines, Engelen organizes, through both intention and chance, the elements of sound and silence in each piece. The landscape of the paper determines the music that can be made from it.
In performing Falten, musicians "walk" through this architectural landscape, using the paper's planes, heights, and structures as parameters for qualities in volume, pitch, rhythm, tension, character, and the spatiality of sound. The lines on the page and resultant folds manifest the score as an intricate drawing. Falten for Percussion consists of eight parts, and will be debuted by the celebrated percussion ensemble Talujon.
Curated by Nova Benway.
William Engelen: Falten is made possible with financial support from the Mondriaan Fund and with public funds from the Consulate General of The Netherlands in New York.
Talujon performs:
Thursday, November 21, 7:30pm during our Opening Reception. No admission fee.
Friday, November 22, 8:00pm at ISSUE Project Room
Celebrated percussion ensemble Talujon will perform William Engelen's recent work Falten, a hybrid of score and sculpture. Percussionist Eli Keszler and the Ashcan Orchestra's Pat Spadine will perform Aki Onda's Damaged, in which slide projections from Onda's ongoing series of New York street photography serve as visual cues for improvisation.
This is a ticketed, off-site event that will be held at ISSUE Project Room, 22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn. Please purchase tickets here and use discount code DRAW for a special $12 rate.
Read William Engelen: Falten Lab gallery brochure.
Sean Scully
Change and Horizontals
This intensely focused survey comprises Sean Scully's (b. 1945, Dublin, Ireland) acrylic, ink, graphite, and masking-tape drawings from 1974–75—presented together for the first time in over 30 years—as well as two large-scale paintings from the same period and one of the artist's personal notebooks. Scully's maturation as a painter can easily be traced back to innovations in his early drawings. These drawings are marked by refined geometries that re-imagine the history of abstraction as an art rooted in experience—"something felt and something seen," as the artist has said. Executed in London and New York City respectively, the Change and Horizontals drawings, along with their preparatory sketches and never-before-seen experimental typewriter drawings from the same period, highlight Scully's core concern with line and color's relation to place. Viewed together, the works chart an evolution of composition and gesture that provides unique insight into this artist's singular aesthetic. This New York exhibition is the last stop on a tour that included the UK, Germany, and Italy.
Curated by Brett Littman and Joanna Kleinberg Romanow.
Read Drawing Papers 99: Sean Scully: Change and Horizontals.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Sean Scully, Change #7 (detail), 1975. Acrylic and tape on paper, 22 1/2 x 30 2/3 inches. Courtesy Neo Neo Inc, New York. Photo © Sean Scully.
Susan Hefuna and Luca Veggetti
Premiere on September 16 at 7pm (doors open at 6pm)
Additional performances on September 17, 18 at 7pm
(Duration approximately one hour)
The world premiere of NOTATIONOTATIONS marks a first-time collaboration between renowned, multimedia artist Susan Hefuna (b. Germany, 1962) and contemporary choreographer Luca Veggetti (b. Italy, 1963). NOTATIONOTATIONS posits the idea that if a line is the trace of a point in motion, then the human body moving through the space of the observed world is also a drawing. Staged over three nights, this event will open and close with a new video installation by Hefuna of a bustling, lower Manhattan intersection—a literal mapping of people and place that examines movement as something that is both rehearsed and habitual. Sketched onto the floor will be an expansive web of chalk lines made by Hefuna (her largest work to date) in advance of an audience; its dramatic creation captured by film. The artist perseveres via the projection, which will be screened as Veggetti's dancers gradually erase the drawn surface through repetitive, physical gestures. The performance culminates in a dynamic display of swooping whorls made by their distilled movements across the floor. The effect is its own form of choreographic documentation.
Special thanks to the dancers Olivia Ancona, PeiJu Chien-Pott, a soloist from the Martha Graham Dance Company, and Gabrielle Lamb.
Produced by Brett Littman and Joanna Kleinberg Romanow.
Read Drawing Papers 106: Susan Hefuna and Luca Veggetti: NOTATIONOTATIONS.
Buy the catalogue.
Terry Smith
Following Terry Smith's IDEAS CITY 2013 Site specific commission, The Drawing Center will present Document, a gallery exhibition of photographs, drawings, film, and notebook sketches from the project. The exhibition will take place in The Drawing Center's Lab Gallery from June 18 – August 18, 2013.
Co-curated by Nova Benway and Aimee Good
Ken Price
Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Works on Paper 1962–2010
Ken Price: Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Works on Paper 1962–2010 travelled to the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico from February 22–May 4, 2014.
This exhibition marks the first survey of drawings by Ken Price, an artist best known for his sculptural work. A selection of 65 works on paper will track Price's pursuit of drawing over 50 years and will demonstrate a wide range of characters and techniques.
Curated by Douglas Dreishpoon, Chief Curator, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Ken Price: Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Works on Paper 1962–2010 is made possible in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Major support for the exhibition and accompanying catalogue is provided by the Matthew Marks Gallery, Dedalus Foundation, James Corcoran, Tracy Lew, and Beth Rudin DeWoody. Additional funding is provided by Franklin Parrasch, Suzanne Deal Booth and David G. Booth, and Sara Szold.
Art in America review
"The L.A. artist Ken Price, mostly known for his ceramic sculptures, is in the spotlight in New York, where a retrospective opened this week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Sept. 22) and an incomparable group of works on paper, by turns racy, tender and sublime, is at the Drawing Center. " - Art in America
Giosetta Fioroni
This landmark exhibition is Italian artist Giosetta Fioroni's first solo show in North America. The show will feature over 80 works in drawing, painting, film, theater design, and illustration, dating from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, decades during which the artist formulated a unique response to a developing commercial culture. Although many of the works are executed on canvas, drawing remains at the forefront of Fioroni's oeuvre, and her investment in hand-rendering serves to distinguish her practice from that of her American Pop Art peers. This exhibition will also be on view from October 25, 2013–January 26, 2014 at Galleria nazionale d'arte moderna e contemporanea in Rome.
Curated by Claire Gilman, Curator
Giosetta Fioroni: L'Argento is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Major support is provided by Simone and Mirella Haggiag, Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, Sarah Peter, and Lia Rumma.
The New York Times review
"After looking at Ms. Fioroni's silvery paintings of women's faces, often culled from the cinema or magazines, one might add to her list Italian filmmakers like Michelangelo Antonioni and Bernardo Bertolucci." - Karen Rosenberg, The New York Times
Read Drawing Papers 104: Giosetta Fioroni: L'Argento.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Giosetta Fioroni, Liberty, 1965. Pencil, white and aluminum enamel on canvas, 57 1/2 x 44 13/16 inches. Collection Jacorossi, Rome. Courtesy of the artist.
Drawing Out
Student Artwork from the Drawing Connections Program
Drawing Out: Student Artwork from the Drawing Connections Program features student artwork from the Drawing Connections program, which pairs practicing artists with teachers in Lower Manhattan public schools to develop projects that relate classroom curricula to exhibitions at The Drawing Center.
Curated by Aimee Good, Director of Education and Community Programs.
Alexandre Singh
The Pledge
The first North American museum exhibition of works by Alexandre Singh, this presentation will be comprised of the artist's new series of Assembly Instructions entitled The Pledge. This project takes interviews that the artist conducted throughout 2011 with noted scientists, artists, writers, and filmmakers, and transforms them into fictional dialogues visualized according to Singh's signature format of collaged photocopies connected by hand-drawn pencil dots on the wall. Filling the Main Gallery, Singh's fictionalized—and spatialized—interviews will position drawing not only as a physical gesture, but also as a graphic conduit for the imaginative process.
Curated by Claire Gilman, Curator
Alexandre Singh: The Pledge is made possible in part by Etant donnés: The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art and the Grand Marnier Foundation. Additional funding is provided by Zoe and Joel Dictrow.
Go to here to read The Pledge interviews excerpted from PALAIS magazine
Read Drawing Papers 102: Alexandre Singh: The Pledge.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Alexandre Singh, Assembly Instructions (The Pledge- Leah Kelly) (detail), 37 framed inkjet ultrachrome archival prints and dotted pencil lines, 2011. Courtesy Sprueth Magers: Berlin and London; Art: Concept: Paris; Metro Pictures: New York; Monitor Gallery: Rome.
Ignacio Uriarte
Line of Work
The Drawing Center is pleased to present the first North American solo museum exhibition of work by the Berlin-based artist Ignacio Uriarte. Inspired by his former career in business administration, Uriarte showcases the aesthetics of the office and its travails. Creating what he can with what is immediately available to him, Uriarte converts the information, skills, and objects encountered in the workplace into explorations of plane geometry and pure abstraction. His drawings, at turns bold and subtle, improvised and predetermined, occupy a zone somewhere between the febrile forces of the imagination and the stultifying culture of office life.
Curated by Joanna Kleinberg Romanow, Assistant Curator
Ignacio Uriarte: Line of work is made possible in part by Acción Cultural Española (AC/E). Additional support is provided by Nathalie and Charles De Gunzburg, Daniel Romanow, The Goldstone Family Foundation, John Romanow, an anonymous donor, and Martina Yamin.
Special thanks to the Goethe-Institut, New York.
Read Drawing Papers 103: Ignacio Uriarte: Line of work.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Ignacio Uriarte, BIC Transitions, 2010, BIC pen on paper, Sixteen drawings, each: 11 13/16 x 16 9/16 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona.
Ishmael Randall Weeks
Cuts, Burns, Punctures
This project by Peruvian born, New York and Cusco-based artist Ishmael Randall Weeks will provide a meditation on recent Peruvian history in the form of a double slide projection using found slides that Weeks burns, punctures, cuts, and draws upon. As the slides move in and out of focus and Weeks' intervention ranges from minimal to extreme, he develops a personalized narrative response to the politically and socially charged moment of 1970s and '80s Peru—a period of war and extreme violence.
Curated by Claire Gilman, Curator
The Mario Gradowczyk Public Program Series supports programming related to the institution's Latin American exhibitions and other public programs inspired by critical issues in contemporary drawing and is funded by Felisa Gradowczyk, Diego Gradowczyk, and Isabella Hutchinson.
Image: Ishmael Randall Weeks, Cuts, Burns, Punctures, 2012. Double-focus slide projection with hand-altered mechanism. Courtesy of the artist and Eleven Rivington: New York.
Read Ishmael Randall Weeks: Cuts, Burns, Punctures Lab gallery brochure.
Guillermo Kuitca
Guillermo Kuitca: Diarios will be the first U.S. museum exhibition of a selection of paintings made from 2005 to the present. Since 1994, Kuitca has taken failed and discarded canvases, stretched them over an abandoned table from his parents' garden, and then spent periods of time ranging from three to six months creating intentional and accidental doodles, drawings, and recordings on their surfaces. The Diarios, as the artist calls them, are the most transparently personal works in his oeuvre as they gather residue like phone numbers, titles of paintings, email addresses, blank spots where books sat, lists, and collaged elements that record the ebb and flow of life inside and outside the studio. In addition to the Diarios, The Drawing Center will present a projection of the table in Kuitca's studio that will document the next Diario as it is being made. This exhibition will travel to the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI from February 22 - May 26, 2013 and then to MCA Denver, where it will be on view from June 21 - September 15, 2013.
Curated by Brett Littman, Executive Director
Read Drawing Papers 100:Guillermo Kuitca: Diarios.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Guillermo Kuitca, Diario (25 May – 20 October 2005). Mixed media on paper, 47 1/4 inches diameter (1 5/8 inches deep). Collection of the Artist. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York.
José Antonio Suárez Londoño
The Yearbooks
This exhibition will include a selection of notebooks (also referred to as "yearbooks") dating from 1997 to the present. Works will be taken from the Colombian artist's ongoing project in which he creates a daily drawing based on a book or series of books that he reads over the course of a year. Loose drawings excerpted from José Antonio Suárez Londoño's sketchbooks will be exhibited alongside notebooks and select source books in vitrines.
Curated by Claire Gilman, Curator
Read Drawing Papers 101: José Antonio Suárez Londoño:The Yearbooks.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: José Antonio Suárez Londoño, Delacroix Diary (June), 1999. Mixed media, 5 15/16 x 4 1/8 inches (30 pages). Courtesy of the artist.
In Deed
Certificates of Authenticity in Art
Exploring the notion of artists' certificates of authenticity over the past 50 years, works in this exhibition range from the most formal legal certificates to dashed-off notations, all of which play a role in defining the parameters of a given art work. Legal and ontological implications will be investigated, including the certificate's ability to embody the artwork itself, while also serving as its referent, deed, legal statement, or fiscal invoice. This international traveling exhibition will make its only New York stop at The Drawing Center.
Curated by Susan Hapgood and Cornelia Lauf, independent curators
The Drawing Center's Reopening Reception | Friday November 2, 6:00 PM
Panel Discussion | Thursday November 8, 6:00 PM
Image: Piero Manzoni, Declaration of Authenticity No. 50 (Carte d'authenticité No. 50), 1961. Ink on paper, inscribed and signed, two-sided (front), 11 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches. Courtesy Joanne and Jon Hendricks, New York.
Sean Scully
Change and Horizontals
The Drawing Center presents Sean Scully: Change and Horizontals . This intensely focused survey is comprised of acrylic, ink, graphite, and masking-tape drawings from 1974–75—presented together for the first time in over 30 years—as well as two large-scale paintings from the same period and the artist's personal notebooks. Culled from two distinct series, the Change and Horizontals drawings—executed in London and New York respectively—highlight the importance of color and form within Scully's abstractions. Color is always rooted in a particular place, and form manifests the self. Impressions of each city are fundamental to these drawings, as location plays a key role in the artist's life and oeuvre; as the artist stated in 2006, "People tend to think of abstraction as abstract. But nothing is abstract: it's a self-portrait. A portrait of one's condition." Scully's move from London to New York City in 1975 marked a stylistic breakthrough to a period during which he became more engaged with the tones and textures of the metropolis that surrounded him.
Sean Scully: Change and Horizontals is co-curated by Joanna Kleinberg and Brett Littman of The Drawing Center.
The exhibition began its transcontinental tour at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, where it was on view from January 13–February 11, 2012, before traveling to Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK, from March 2–July 13, 2012. The exhibition will then be presented at Galleria nazionale d'arte moderna e contemporanea, Rome, from March 14–June 9, 2013 and The Drawing Center, New York, from September 26–November 10, 2013.
Read Drawing Papers 99: Sean Scully: Change and Horizontals.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Sean Scully, Change #7 (detail), 1975. Acrylic and tape on paper, 22 1/2 x 30 2/3 inches. Courtesy Neo Neo Inc, New York. Photo © Sean Scully.
Drawing In, On, and Through the Landscape
The Drawing Center & Big Screen Plaza Pathways: Drawing In, On, and Through the Landscape September 21–24, 2011 855 Sixth Avenue & 29th Street in New York City (Located in the plaza behind the Eventi Hotel, FoodParc, and Bar Basque) Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 21, 7–9pm Pathways: Drawing In, On, and Through the Landscape investigates the medium of drawing through six short films shown in succession. In these animated and live action shorts, drawing takes place atop, from within, and while travelling through diverse landscapes: urban and natural, as well as public and private. While some films in this presentation use drawing as a means of recording the ever-changing landscape, others present creative responses to specific physical or environmental conditions. In all instances, drawing serves as a means of connecting its practitioners to a dynamic world. This project includes films by seven internationally recognized mid-career and emerging artists: Ann Carlson & Mary Ellen Strom, Mark Harris, Jessica Mein, Terry Nauheim, Candida Richardson, and Gosia Wlodarczak. Hours: September 21, 7-9pm | September 22-24, 11am-6pm
Curated by Claire Gilman, Curator; Joanna Kleinberg, Assistant Curator; and Rachel Liebowitz, Assistant Curator, The Drawing Center.
Image: Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom, Four Parallel Lines, 2007, Still from video. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York, NY.
Drawing and its Double
Selections from the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 21, 6–8pm
This landmark exhibition, co-organized with the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica (ING) in Rome, of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Italy, is comprised of fifty-nine rarely-exhibited engraved metal printing plates dating from the sixteenth century to the late twentieth century, culled exclusively from the collections of one of the world's most important museums devoted to the Graphic Arts. Drawing and its Double will include significant and iconic works by influential artists and engravers such as Giorgio Ghisi (1520–1582), Lafrery Du Perac (1512–1577), Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Antonio Canova (1757–1822), Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), Piero Dorazio (1927–2005), and Achille Perilli (b. 1927). This exhibition will present the plates as primary art objects without preparatory drawings or the resultant prints. Historical and modern plates from the archive will be presented in The Drawing Center's Main Gallery. The Drawing Room will feature Decalogo by Paolo Canevari, a new body of work which was created during the artist's 2008 residency at the ING. Established in 1975, the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica is the result of a merger between the Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe and the Calcografia Nazionale. Housed in a monumental complex at Palazzo Poli near the Trevi Fountain in Rome, ING's vast collection is comprised of 23,400 printing plates, 25,000 drawings, more than 152,000 prints, 16,000 photographs, and 25,000 books. Since its inception, ING has been instrumental in promoting the systematic study of printing plates as unique art works, and is dedicated to promoting the study and conservation of historical printmaking techniques.
Co-curated by ING curators Ginevra Mariani and Antonella Renzitti, and Brett Littman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Piazza di Monte Cavallo , c. 1748. Etching on copper retouched with Burin, 15 1/2 x 21 3/4 inches (394 x 555 mm) (recto). Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Rome. VIC 1400/708.
Paolo Canevari
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 21, 6-8pm Paolo Canevari: Decalogo will be on view in a specially designed Drawing Room located within the Main Gallery from April 22–June 24, 2011. This recent body of work by Paolo Canevari (b. 1963) was originally commissioned and exhibited by the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica (ING) in Rome in October 2008. Comprised of ten large-scale etched plates, this presentation extends the thesis of the concurrent exhibition, Drawing and its Double: Selections from the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica , by displaying plates without their resultant prints. Decalogo, the Italian shorthand for the Ten Commandments and perhaps the most well-known social contract or "rules to live by," continues Canevari's investigation into how dynamic imagery can reveal political and social crises. The plates reverberate on both technical and emotional levels, and lay bare the artist's acute and perceptive understanding of our times.
This exhibition is co-curated by ING curator, Antonella Renzitti and Brett Littman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center.
Image: Paolo Canevari, Hanging Around, from the Decalogo series, 2008. Etched copper and dry-point, nickel-plated, 55 x 35 x 3/4 inches (set of ten). Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Christian Stein, Milan.
Dr. Lakra
Presented in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, this will be the first solo exhibition in New York by Mexican artist Dr. Lakra (b. 1972, Mexico). For this exhibition, Lakra will create a site-specific wall drawing throughout the gallery, integrating works on paper. In this presentation, Lakra uses drawing as the most immediate artistic impulse to invoke fundamental human urges like sex and violence. Using a range of source material, from anatomy textbooks to magazine pin-ups and comic strips, Lakra looks to Mexican and international art historical traditions, as well as the contemporary iconography of tattoo art and borrows a rich sense of satire from his early interest in cartooning. Creating a transformative visual overload, Lakra merges representation with an invented universe, as works transcend categorization and challenge social norms.
This exhibition is curated by Assistant Curator Rachel Liebowitz. On view at 3 Wooster Street (between Canal and Grand) Special Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10am-6pm (closed Sunday & Monday)
Read Drawing Papers 97: Dr. Lakra.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Dr. Lakra, Untitled , 2010. Ink on paper, 11 x 8 ½ inches. Courtesy of the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City.
Drawing Out
Student Artwork from the Drawing Connections Program
Recess Activities, Inc., 41 Grand Street (between West Broadway and Thompson) Drawing Out: Student Artwork from the Drawing Connections Program features student artwork from the Drawing Connections program, which pairs practicing artists with teachers in Lower Manhattan public schools to develop projects that relate classroom curricula to exhibitions at The Drawing Center. Now in its 7th year, Drawing Out features group projects by approximately 100 students from four participating schools: Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School, P.S. 130 Hernando Desoto School, P.S. 42 Benjamin Altman School, and City As School, Brooklyn Campus.Curated by Aimee Good, Director of Education and Community Programs.
Image: Imogene Dunn, 2nd Grade, P.S. 130 Hernando Desoto School.
Drawn from Photography
This group exhibition focuses on a growing trend within drawing: the meticulous translation of images from photographs and photo-based media. Concentrating on instances of social and political transformation from the last two centuries, the thirteen artists in Drawn from Photography turn to source material that ranges from snapshots taken by the artists to photos from news media. The exhibition features Emily Prince's drawn archive of every fallen American serviceman and woman in Iraq; D-L Alvarez, Andrea Bowers, Sam Durant, and Frank Selby's renderings of iconic photos of political uprisings and counter-cultural movements; Fernando Bryce's redrawn historical archives; and Ewan Gibbs and Richard Forster's drawings after snapshots of the changing industrial landscape. Together, the artists in Drawn from Photography present a novel approach to the drawn medium. In their hands, drawing as rote translation signals a desire for agency coupled with a sense of the distance between "reality out there" and our attempts to comprehend or transform it.
Exhibiting artists include: D-L Alvarez, Andrea Bowers, Fernando Bryce, Sam Durant, Ewan Gibbs, Karl Haendel, Richard Forster, Serkan Ozkaya, Emily Prince, Frank Selby, Paul Sietsema, Mary Temple, and Christian Tomaszewski.
Curated by Claire Gilman, Curator
Read Drawing Papers 96: Drawn From Photography.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Frank Selby, Light Blue Riot , 2010. Watercolor on Mylar, 28 x 34 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Museum 52.
Day Job
Day Job features works selected through an open call to artists currently in The Drawing Center's Viewing Program. Rather than subscribing to the idea that non-artistic work is by definition disruptive to an artist's practice, Day Job looks at the ways in which the information, skills, ideas, working conditions, or materials encountered in the work world can become a source of influence. The exhibition also addresses the ways in which contemporary artists support themselves in an economic climate that often demands particularly diverse and flexible solutions to staying afloat. Comprised of work by 21 artists, the exhibition looks at the relationship between an artist's "day job" and his or her creative practice. Although the term "day job" may be cast as something that steals time and focus from an artist's practice, a generative relationship can also exist. Rather than subscribing to the idea that having a job is by definition disruptive, Day Job looks at the ways in which the information, skills, ideas, working conditions, or materials encountered on the job can become a source of influence. This presentation explores the ways in which artists relate to and choose their day jobs, or conversely, how one's job may serve as an impetus for creating artistic work. Preceded by a long history of artists whose creative practice existed in parallel with other jobs, such as Alan Saret, who worked for New York's Port Authority engineering division; Rosalyn Drexler, a wrestler; Andy Warhol, who worked in advertising and magazine illustration; and Adrian Piper, a philosophy professor, this presentation also provides a window into the myriad ways in which today's working artists support themselves in an economic climate that often demands diverse and flexible solutions to staying afloat.
Part of the Selections series, this exhibition is curated by Viewing Program Curator Nina Katchadourian.
Day Job was also on view on view at The Freedman Gallery at Albright College from January 26–March 4, 2012 and Pacific Northwest College of Art, Philip Feldman Gallery + Project Space from April 5–May 15, 2012.
Read Drawing Papers 95: Day Job.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Luis Romero. Selected Fetishes, 2006-2010. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Karen Lennox Gallery, Chicago.
Drawings in Motion
SmartSpaces exhibition in the windows of 200 Lafayette Street (between Broome and Kenmare) Reception: Thursday, December 9, 7-9pm This exhibition investigates the variety of approaches to animated drawing in contemporary art, featuring recent work from a selection of internationally recognized mid-career and emerging artists. With hand-drawn images as the foundation of all of the selected work, some artists play directly with the medium of drawing as both technique and the material object, while others use a more whimsical bent, creating imaginative narratives alongside attending visuals. In all the films being screened, the artists explore the relationship between our surroundings, human culture, and identity, ranging from quick gestures to more elaborate, descriptive narratives. Artists included in the exhibition are Brent Green, Susi Jirkuff, Kakyoung Lee, Tala Madani, and Raymond Pettibon.
This exhibition is curated by Assistant Curators Joanna Kleinberg and Rachel Liebowitz.
ABOUT SMARTSPACES SmartSpaces re-imagines vacant urban spaces as places to present contemporary art, with a mission to make art more accessible, while energizing local communities. Working with curators and arts organizations, SmartSpaces facilitates artistic interventions at the borders of public and private space, transforming empty properties into temporary public art venues, with information and tools that engage and inform the public. Educational information includes signage, free cell phone audio guides, text messaging and online video and podcasts. SmartSpaces.org
Paul Rudolph
Lower Manhattan Expressway
Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery, The Cooper Union 7 East 7th Street, 2nd Floor Mon–Fri 12:00–7:00pm, Sat 12:00–5:00pm (Closed Sun) Paul Rudolph: Lower Manhattan Expressway is organized in collaboration with The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union. The Lower Manhattan Expressway (LME) was first conceived by "master builder" Robert Moses in the late 1930s as an expressway system running across Lower Manhattan. The idea was revisited by architect Paul Rudolph in 1967 when the Ford Foundation commissioned a study of the project. Had it been constructed, this major urban design plan would have transformed New York City's topography and infrastructure. In this exhibition, approximately 30 full-scale reproductions of drawings, prints, and photographs dated from 1967–1972 will be on public view for the first time. These works from the Paul Rudolph Archive at the Library of Congress will be shown together with a reconstruction of Rudolph's model of the LME project created by architecture students at The Cooper Union in conjunction with Rawlings Architects PC. Presenting the only records of Rudolph's visionary proposal, this exhibition illuminates Rudolph's unique approach to architectural drawing and highlights the fundamental importance of drawing in his overall practice.
Co-curated by Jim Walrod and Ed Rawlings, Principal, Rawlings Architects PC.
Gerhard Richter
Lines which do not exist
The Drawing Center will present an enhanced version of an exhibition originally on view at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima), UK in 2009. This presentation is comprised of approximately 50 graphite, watercolor, and ink on paper drawings made by Gerhard Richter (b. 1932, Dresden, Germany) over a period of five decades from 1966 to 2005. Although Richter is most celebrated as a painter, this exhibition focuses on the artist's works on paper and explores his complex personal relationship with drawing. The first of its kind in the U.S., the exhibition will also be Richter's first solo show in a public institution in New York since 40 Years of Painting at The Museum of Modern Art (2002).
Curated by Gavin Delahunty, Curator, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK.
Read Drawing Papers 92: Gerhard Richter: "Lines Which Do Not Exist."
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Gerhard Richter, R.O., 22.1.1984 , 1984. Watercolor on paper, 5 1/8 x 7 1/8 inches. Private Collection, Berlin.
Claudia Wieser
Poems of the Right Angle
For her first solo museum exhibition in North America, Berlin-based artist Claudia Wieser (b. 1973, Freilassing, Germany) will present a site-specific installation of glazed ceramic tiles and prismatic mirrored facets against a background of geometrically-patterned wallpaper. In addition to the tile and mirror wall relief, Wieser will show a new series of colorful line drawings that play on the installation's optical and spatial illusions and serve to foreground her distinctive approach to abstraction. Together, the works mark the experiential and the intangible through precise geometries imbued with layers of spiritual, psychic, and phenomenal meaning that lead the viewer into contemplative spaces where the primacy of mark-making and viewing become fused.
Curated by Joanna Kleinberg, Assistant Curator.
Read Drawing Papers 93: Claudia Wieser: Poems of the Right Angle.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Claudia Wieser, Untitled , 2009. Crayon on paper, 19 2/3 x 27 1/2 inches (50 x 70cm). Courtesy of the artist and Sies + Höke.
Leon Golub
Live & Die Like a Lion?
Leon Golub: Live & Die Like a Lion? is the first major museum exhibition to focus on the late drawings of the American artist Leon Golub (1922–2004). This presentation will feature approximately 50 oil stick and ink on Bristol board and vellum drawings made between 1999 and 2004. It will also include Golub's only existent unfinished painting—a chalk sketch of two lions—which he started in 2001 but never completed, as well as preliminary 'background' drawings and the artist's original source material from a variety of wide-circulating periodicals. Although he was most often noted as a painter, Golub used drawing as a foundational tool in his practice. The drawings on view mark a stylistic and thematic shift from a long-term preoccupation with the atrocities of the external world towards an exploration of the personally revelatory. The resulting works are candid examples of an aesthetic immediacy and newfound freedom in the artist's late work.
This exhibition is curated by Brett Littman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center, and will travel to the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL (September 24, 2010–December 12, 2010) and The Museum Het Domein, Sittard, Netherlands (January 22, 2011–April 24, 2011).
Read Drawing Papers 90: Leon Golub: LIVE & DIE LIKE A LION?
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Leon Golub, LIVE & DIE LIKE A LION?, 2002, Oil stick on Bristol, 8 x 10 inches. Collection of Anthony and Judith Seraphin, Seraphin Gallery Philadelphia, PA. Art © Estate of Leon Golub/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York. Photography by: Cathy Carver.
Dorothea Tanning
Early Designs for the Stage
Dorothea Tanning: Early Designs for the Stage will present approximately twenty hand-drawn ballet costume designs by Dorothea Tanning (b.1910) created in collaboration with the early modernist choreographer, George Balanchine. Dating from 1945–1953, the designs will be shown together for the first time, and will be accompanied by archival photographs and ephemera related to the staged productions. This series explores the dynamic intersections of dance, performance, visual art, and costume, while drawing important parallels to Tanning's early discoveries in both painting and sculpture. Taking the form of traditional fashion plates, the blithely rendered drawings are suggestive of bodies in motion and portrayals of outlandish characters through the quirky detailing and sensual drapery of the costumes.
This exhibition is curated by Assistant Curators Joanna Kleinberg and Rachel Liebowitz.
Read Drawing Papers 91: Dorothea Tanning: Early Designs for the Stage.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Costume Design for Night Shadow (A Guest), 1945, Watercolor and wash on paper, 13 7/8 x 9 7/8 inches. Collection of the artist.
Drawing Out
Student Artwork from the Drawing Connections Program
The Drawing Center presents Drawing Out , on view in the Drawing Room from April 10–16, 2010. The exhibition features student artwork from the Drawing Connections program, which pairs practicing artists with teachers in Lower Manhattan public schools to develop projects that relate classroom curricula to exhibitions at The Drawing Center. Now in its 6th year, Drawing Out will feature group projects by approximately 100 students from four participating schools: Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School, P.S. 130 Hernando Desoto School, P.S. 42 Benjamin Altman School, and City As School, Bronx Campus.
Image: Damian Sandy, (Grade 12, Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School), Untitled (detail), 2010. Mixed media on paper, 19 x 24 inches.
Iannis Xenakis
Composer, Architect, Visionary
Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary explores the fundamental role of drawing in the work of Greek avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001). A leading figure in twentieth century music, Xenakis was trained as a civil engineer, then became an architect and developed revolutionary designs while working with Le Corbusier. Comprised of nearly 100 documents created between 1953 and 1984, this is the first North American exhibition dedicated to Xenakis's original works on paper. Included are rarely-seen hand-rendered scores, architectural drawings, conceptual renderings, pre-compositional sketches, and graphic scores.
Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary is co-curated by Xenakis scholar Sharon Kanach and critic Carey Lovelace and will travel to the Canadian Centre for Architecture (June 17 – October 17, 2010) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (November 7, 2010 – February 13, 2011).
Read Drawing Papers 88: Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Iannis Xenakis, Study for Terretektorh, c. 1965-66, color pencil on paper. Courtesy of the Iannis Xenakis Archives, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Sea Marks
Selections Spring 2010
Selections Spring 2010: Sea Mar ks is comprised of works by Agnes Barley, Jerome Marshak, and Peter Matthews, three artists selected from the Viewing Program who notate, describe, and interpret aspects of the sea. The exhibition examines the capacity of drawing to represent something as dynamic, volatile, and vast as the ocean. All three artists in Sea Marks use distinctly different interpretive strategies that yield a range of unexpected results; in fact, one may not immediately recognize the sea in any of their works. While staying within the material bounds of traditional drawing, the works expand our understanding of how drawing acts as a descriptive system and means of interpretation.
This exhibition is curated by Nina Katchadourian, Viewing Program Curator.
Read Drawing Papers 89: Selections Spring 2010: Sea Marks.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Agnes Barley, Untitled Collage , 2009. Acrylic on cut paper, 15 x 16 inches. Photo by Cary Whittier. Courtesy of the artist.
Ree Morton
At the Still Point of the Turning World
An exhibition of drawing-based works by the late American artist Ree Morton (1936 –1977), will be on view in the Main Gallery and Drawing Room from September 18 – December 18, 2009. R ee Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World highlights Morton's influential body of work, remarkably all produced in a single decade between her decision to turn to art full-time in the late 1960s and her tragic death in an automobile accident in 1977, shortly before her 41st birthday. While reflecting many of the currents of post-Minimal art of the 1970s, Morton's work also looked to a pioneering use of personal narrative, intimacy, humor, and poetic imagination. Yet the scope of her artistic production remains largely unrecognized, as does her vital contribution to feminist art practice and the importance of drawing to her development as an artist. The exhibition is comprised of a selection of early drawings, several of which will be on view for the first time, along with major drawing-based sculptural works and a selection of notebook sketches.
Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World is curated by João Ribas, taking its title from a T. S. Eliot poem Morton kept above her studio desk.
Read Drawing Papers 87: Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Ree Morton, Pink Numbers , 8 1/2 x 11 inches, mixed media on paper, 1971. Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York. Photo: Bill Orcutt
Unica Zürn
Dark Spring
Unica Zürn: Dark Spring will present approximately 50 ink and watercolor works on paper by the late German artist and writer Unica Zürn, spanning from the early 1950s until her tragic suicide in 1970. A noted poet and novelist, Zürn produced numerous expressionistic short stories that were published in German newspapers throughout the 1950s before moving to Paris with German Surrealist artist, Hans Bellmer, who would be her partner and collaborator until her death. Zürn began producing paintings and drawings related to her Surrealist-influenced literary work while living in Paris, becoming acquainted with many artists in the Surrealist circle, including André Breton, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp. Part whimsical cartoons, part intricate portraits, Zürn's chimerical fantasies make for drawings that are deeply revelatory yet playfully imaginative.
Curated by João Ribas.
Read Drawing Papers 86: Unica Zürn: Dark Spring.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Unica Zürn, Untitled (detail), 1961. Ink on paper, 12 3/8 x 9 1/4 inches. Courtesy of Ubu Gallery, New York & Galerie Berinson, Berlin. © Brinkmann & Bose Publisher, Berlin.
FAX will invite a multi-generational group of artists, architects, designers, filmmakers, and thinkers to conceive of the fax machine as a drawing tool. Participants will transmit fax-based work via the museum's working fax line throughout the duration of the exhibition. The accumulation of information, errors of transmission, junk faxes, "fax lore," as well as drawings and text – some seminal examples of early fax art – will create an exhibition concerned with reproduction, obsolescence, distribution and mediation. Curated by João Ribas.
This exhibition is co-organized by The Drawing Center, New York, and iCI (Independent Curators International), New York, and circulated by iCI.
Touring Schedule Dowd Gallery, State University of New York, College at Cortland Cortland, New York October 7, 2010 - December 10, 2010 New Galerie Paris, France November 6, 2010 - December 18, 2010 Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts Cambridge, Massachusetts February 17, 2011 - April 3, 2011
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Matt Sheridan Smith, Untitled (contrast test) (detail), 2008. Black and white inkjet print, 8 1/2 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Lisa Cooley Fine Art.
Drawing Out
Student Artwork from Drawing Connections
Drawing Out provides neighboring public school students with a museum visit and in in-school art-making sessions led by teaching artists, culminating in an exhibition of student artwork.
Participating schools: P.S. 42 Benjamin Altman School, P.S. 130 Hernando DeSoto School, H.S. 560 City-As-School High School, and Chelsea Career and Technical High School. Yu Xiang Lin (Grade 3, P.S. Benjamin Altman School), Untitled , 2009. Ink on paper, 24 x 19 inches.
Sun Xun
Shock of Time
Sun Xun: Shock of Time will present two recent hand-drawn animations by Hangzhou-based artist, Sun Xun (b. 1980, China). Shown together for the first time, Shock of Time (2006) and Lie of the Magician (2005) combine traditional drawing materials and printmaking techniques with digital media. The former depicts various tropes and metaphors of duration and transience made from hundreds of single illustrations drawn onto old Communist newspaper and magazine pages. Xun films these drawings to create a series of vignettes revolving around the passage of time. The latter makes use of the artist's own body as a landscape for images of nature (rain clouds evaporating, seedlings taking root) that evoke myths of creation. Sun Xun: Shock of Time will be the artist's first solo museum show in New York.
Curated by João Ribas.
Read Drawing Papers 85: Sun Xun: Shock of Time.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Sun Xun, Still from Shock of Time , 2006. Single channel video, 5:29 minutes. Courtesy Fortune Cookie Projects.
Apparently Invisible
Selections Spring 2009
Apparently Invisible: Selections Spring 2009 presents work by nine artists selected from the Viewing Program. The pieces included in the exhibition skirt the edge of perception and cognition, requiring a recalibration of the visual and a momentary investment in a more quiet sublime.
This exhibition includes work by Susan Collis, Michaela Frühwirth, Elana Herzog, Marietta Hoferer, Sarah Kabot, Anne Lindberg, Janine Magelssen, Chris Nau, and Janet Passehl.
Curated by Nina Katchadourian, Joanna Kleinberg, and Rachel Liebowitz.
Read Drawing Papers 84: Selections Spring 2009: Apparently Invisible.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Chris Nau, Inhabitat XVI (detail), 2008. Graphite and cuts on drywall, 96 x 192 inches.
Matt Mullican
A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking
For over three decades, New York-based artist Matt Mullican (b. 1951, Santa Monica, CA) has created a complex body of work concerned with systems of knowledge, meaning, language, and signification. Since the end of the 1970s, he has also conducted performances and created drawings while under hypnosis as a means to explore the nature of behavior. Matt Mullican: A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking will include work from throughout Mullican's artistic career, emphasizing the role of drawing in his attempt to understand, organize, and categorize experience. Mullican's practice, surveyed through drawings, collages, video, and installation, confronts the nature of subjective understanding, rationality, perception, and cognition—in essence proposing a 'picture' of the world through the medium of drawing.
Curated by João Ribas.
Read Drawing Papers 82: Matt Mullican: A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Matt Mullican, Untitled , 1985. Oil paint on paper, 18 x 24 inches.
M/M (Paris)
Just Like an Ant Walking on the Edge of the Visible
The design work of M/M (Paris) is the product of an influential and creative partnership founded in 1992 by Mathias Augustyniak and Michaël Amzalag. Rooted in an expanded conception of graphic design, M/M's multi-disciplinary approach extends to artistic collaborations, product design, and commercial projects. M/M (Paris): Just Like an Ant Walking On the Edge of the Visible will feature a newly commissioned project consisting of 41 wood-and-metal stools painted with silk-screened graphics. Designed specifically for the Drawing Room, the installation will use one of M/M (Paris)'s signature letterform alphabets to compose the exhibition's titular phrase. As part of the exhibition, invited artists will utilize the installation to host a series of drawing courses.
Curated by João Ribas.
Read Drawing Papers 83: M/M (Paris): Just Like an Ant Walking on the Edge of the Visible.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Exhibition design rendering by M/M (Paris), 2008.
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Demonstration Drawings
Rirkrit Tiravanija: Demonstration Drawings presents over 200 works on paper from the artist's ongoing series of commissioned drawings derived from photographs of demonstrations published in the International Herald Tribune . While public protests and mass demonstrations are often associated with the politics of the 1960s, Tiravanija's ongoing project reconsiders their relevance in today's political climate. The Demonstration Drawings provide a perspectival view of collective actions, political protests, and popular sovereignty movements worldwide—turning ephemeral images of strife and social conflict into documents of political aspiration.
Curated by João Ribas.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled (demonstration no. 138) , 2006. Graphite on paper, 8 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist; 1301PE, Los Angeles; and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York.
Greta Magnusson Grossman
Furniture and Lighting
Greta Magnusson Grossman: Furniture and Lighting is the first major U.S. exhibition to focus on the drawings of this Swedish-born, Los Angeles-based architect and industrial designer. A two-time recipient of the Museum of Modern Art's "Good Design" award, Grossman (1906-1999) remains an under-recognized, yet highly influential figure in the Southern California design movement of the 1950s and 60s. This exhibition will present recently discovered and never-before-seen industrial design drawings executed between 1948 and 1959 as well as archival photographs of Grossman's residential buildings, interiors, and furnishings.
Curated by Brett Littman.
Read Drawing Papers 81: Greta Magnusson Grossman: Furniture and Lighting.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Greta Magnusson Grossman, Technical drawing for table lamp, The Ralph O. Smith Company, c. 1948. Pencil on paper, 8 1/2 x 12 1/2 inches. Courtesy R 20th Century Permanent Collection, NY.
Kathleen Henderson
What If I Could Draw a Bird That Could Change the World?
Selections Fall 2008 features the work of Viewing Program artist Kathleen Henderson. Using her chosen medium of oil stick on paper, the artist deploys a sparse, tense, and energetic line to make drawings that are at turns comic, perverse, poignant, and brutal. Henderson works with the radio on, the sounds of talking pundits and news stories filtering through her onto the page where ambiguous scenarios offer playful or possibly sinister interactions. By offering disquieting representations of patterns of human behavior, her work asks us to consider our own complicity in and capacity for violence as well as benevolence.
Curated by Nina Katchadourian.
Read Drawing Papers 80: Kathleen Henderson: What if I Could Draw a Bird that Could Change the World?.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Kathleen Henderson, Hole , 2008. Oil stick on paper, 17 1/2 x 23 inches.
Frederick Kiesler
This exhibition explores the pivotal role drawing played in the interdisciplinary and multifaceted work of Austro-American designer, artist, theoretician, and architect, Frederick Kiesler (1890-1965). Frederick Kiesler: Co-Realities will trace Kiesler's interest in the expressive and conceptual possibilities of drawing through key projects and concepts from the 1930s to the 1960s, from his early work as a scenic designer to his revolutionary designs for Peggy Guggenheim's Art of the Century Gallery, and his decades long investigation into the unique structure of his Endless House . As so few of Kiesler's installations, sets, or projects remain or were ever realized, the drawings have become key to understanding his significant contribution to 20th century thought. Philip Johnson called Kiesler "the best-known non-building architect of our time." Frederick Kiesler: Co-Realities will feature an exhibition design by the New York-based architecture firm nArchitects.
This exhibition is co-organized and curated by Dieter Bogner, President, Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna and João Ribas, Curator, The Drawing Center.
Read Drawing Papers 77: Frederick Kiesler: Co-Realities.
Buy the catalogue.
Drawing on Film
Drawing on Film will survey the practice of "direct film"—the process of drawing, scratching, or otherwise manipulating film stock to create images without a camera. The exhibition will present works spanning from the late 1930s to the present and will highlight an overlooked facet of experimental film. Many of the works to be exhibited are seminal films in the history of the genre—including Len Lye's A Colour Box and Norman McLaren's Blinkity Blank —while other, more contemporary works are being screened for the first time. By showcasing films from over seven decades, Drawing on Film will present an overview of the rich legacy of direct film. The exhibition will transform the Drawing Room into a screening room with a program of films by eleven artists that will screen multiple times each day. In addition, individual installations, one by Jennifer Reeves and one by Jennifer West, will run for one week each. Two separate evening screenings will feature works by Stan Brakhage and by Dieter Roth and Amy Granat, respectively.
Artists include: Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Amy Granat, Pierre Hébert, Len Lye, Norman McLaren, Bärbel Neubauer, Jenny Perlin, Jennifer Reeves, Richard Reeves, Dieter Roth, Harry Smith, and Jennifer West. Screening Schedule Thursday, May 29 – Saturday, July 5 (daily) Tuesday, July 22 – Thursday, July 24 (daily) Len Lye, A Colour Box , 1935, 4 min.; Norman McLaren, Blinkity Blank , 1955, 5:15 min.; Harry Smith, Early Abstractions no. 3: Interwoven , 1947–49, 3:20 min.; Bärbel Neubauer, Roots , 1996, 3:44 min.; Dieter Roth, Dot , 1956–62, 2:39 min; Jenny Perlin, Lost Treasures , 1999, 2:33 min.; Pierre Hébert, Op Hop – Hop Op , 1966, 3:30 min.; Richard Reeves, Linear Dreams , 1997, 7 min.; Jennifer West, Double Fast Luck Film (16mm film leader sprinkled with Red Luck Oil, Green Luck perfume, soaked in mint, cinnamon and vanilla) , 2006, 2:44 min.; Len Lye, Free Radicals , 1958 (revised 1979), 4 min.; Robert Breer, Eyewash , 1959, 3 min.; Pierre Hébert, Memories of War , 1983, 16:10 min.; Bärbel Neubauer, Moonlight , 1997, 4:11 min.; Norman McLaren, Scherzo , 1939, 1:25 min.; and Amy Granat, Valentines Day Film , 2008, 6:57 min. Tuesday, July 8 – Saturday, July 12 (daily) Jennifer West, Popped Cherry Film (16mm film leader stained with cherry juice, popped with hole puncher) , 2007, 2:40 min. Tuesday, July 15 – Saturday, July 19 (daily) Jennifer Reeves, Light. Work. Mood. Disorder. , 2007, 26:12 min. (Music composed and performed by Anthony Burr.)
Curated by João Ribas.
Image: Richard Reeves, Film strip from Linear Dreams , 1997. 35mm film, 7 min.
Yüksel Arslan
Visual Interpretations
Yüksel Arslan (b. 1933, Istanbul, Turkey) has often been associated with the loosely-structured surrealist movement in Turkey and was affiliated with the intellectual circles of 1960s Paris that included Jean-Paul Sarte, André Breton, and Jean Dubuffet. For the past 60 years, Arslan has been mining the depths of the unconscious mind, bringing together Western and Eastern aesthetics and philosophy in finely wrought works that he calls Artures . Serial in format, the hundreds of drawings he has produced deal with subjects as varied as schizophrenia and the eroticism of de Sade, Bataille, and Artaud, as well as visual interpretations of artists, poets, writers, scientists, musicians, and philosophers that have influenced his thinking. Arslan's working process includes the use of self-made and antique tools and the production of his own colors using ancient methods of combining raw pigments with his own saliva, blood, urine, and other organic materials like honey, earth, and egg whites.
Though Arslan has exhibited extensively in Europe and is well-known in Turkey, this exhibition in the Drawing Room, curated by Executive Director Brett Littman, will be the first survey of his work in the United States.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Yüksel Arslan, "L'Homme XXVI: Hallucinations, Arture 385" (detail), 1988. Handmade pigments and ink on paper, 13 1/4 x 10 3/4 inches. Photo by Cengiz Tacer.
Drawing Out
Student Artwork from Drawing Connections
Drawing Out is an annual exhibition of student artwork from the Drawing Connections Education Program, which places teaching artists in downtown public schools. Through this program, The Drawing Center partners with four neighboring Lower Manhattan public schools to provide students with an in-depth visual art experience, culminating with this exhibition in the Center's galleries.
Selections Spring 2008
Spring Selections 2008 will mark the first exhibition curated with the use of The Drawing Center's newly established online Artist Registry. Selections exhibitions are a cornerstone of The Drawing Center's exhibition program and a key component of the Viewing Program. Selections Spring 2008 celebrates the 92nd Selections exhibition in the Center's ongoing series that presents new work by underrepresented and emerging artists.
This exhibition will feature work by Hannah Burr, David Clarkson, Isabelle Cornaro, Dianna Frid, Brian Lund, Tina Schneider, Kate Smith, Casey Jex Smith, and Andrea Sulzer.
Curated by Nina Katchadourian.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Isabelle Cornaro, Savannah Surrounding Bangui and the River Utubangui (detail), 2003–07. Digital pigment print on rag paper, 16 1/2 x 23 5/8 inches.
Sterling Ruby
Sterling Ruby addresses notions of violence, repression and social control through a diverse artistic practice, incorporating sculpture, video, photography, drawing, collage and installation. Through visceral, cryptic and architectonic motifs, ranging from "Supermax" prisons to biomorphic forms, Ruby trades medium-specificity for an exploration of shifting borders of social and subjective experience that propose a self-styled "amorphous law." Sterling Ruby: CHRON will present a survey of the LA-based artist's work in drawing with approximately fifty works spanning from 2003 to the present, including several new large-scale works conceived for the Drawing Room. The exhibit will foreground the role of drawing as medium, gesture and act, in Ruby's multivalent body of work—from graffiti-based spray paint drawings to photographic collages, nail polish abstractions, and inscribed Formica sculptures—which when viewed together reveal formal and thematic connections informed by the artist's background in drawing.
Curated by João Ribas.
Read Drawing Papers 76: Sterling Ruby: Chron.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Sterling Ruby, Prison (detail), 2004. Collage and pencil on paper, 31 1/2 x 23 3/4 inches.
Alan Saret
Gang Drawings
Alan Saret: Gang Drawings marks the first major museum exhibition of Saret's work in 17 years. Saret was a vital part of the Soho alternative art scene in the late 1960s and 70s, as well as an important figure in the history of process art and post-minimal art. The exhibition will focus on the artist's "gang drawings," made from fistfuls ("gangs") of colored pencils swept across the page, spanning from the 1960s to the present.
Organized in close collaboration with Saret himself, the exhibition will feature never before seen work drawn from the artist's own archive.
Curated by João Ribas.
Read Drawing Papers 73: Alan Saret: Gang Drawings.
Buy the catalogue.
Kirstine Roepstorff
It's Not the Eye of the Needle That Changed–The Time
It's Not the Eye of the Needle That Changed–The Time presents a new body of work by the Berlin-based artist Kirstine Roepstorff in which the medium of collage is used to confront the tension between political identity and individual desire. Through a working method she calls "approprio-arranging," Roepstorff sews, pins, glues, and weaves together photocopies, fabrics, glitter, paper, and images appropriated from magazines and newspapers, constructing a poetic, post-feminist practice that addresses issues such as consumerism, the failure of the social democratic project, and contemporary gender politics. It's Not the Eye of the Needle That Changed–The Time will be the artist's first solo museum exhibition in North America.
Curated by João Ribas.
Read Drawing Papers 74: Kirstine Roepstorff: It's Not the Eye of the Needle that Changed – The Time.
Buy the catalogue.
Jon Kessler
Works on Paper
Best-known for large-scale kinetic sculptures and installations, Jon Kessler has been exploring the mass media's infatuation with war, disaster, sex, and celebrity through politically charged work since the 1980s.
Jon Kessler: Works on Paper, the artist's first exhibition of drawing-based work, will consist of portraits collaged from magazines and newspapers that confront the collusion of advertising, propaganda, surveillance, and technology.
Read Drawing Papers 72: Jon Kessler: You Have 43 Friends.
Buy the catalogue.
Non-Declarative Art
Selections Fall 2007
Non-Declarative Art explores ambiguity and the rejection of overt meaning in the work of thirteen emerging artists selected from the Viewing Program. The exhibition presents drawing-based work that ranges from pointed to trivial in subject matter, from perfection in craft to studied clumsiness.
Read Drawing Papers 71: Non-Declarative Art: Selections Fall 2007.
Buy the catalogue.
Between Transparency and the Invisible
Gego, Between Transparency and the Invisible explores the intriguing relationship between line and light in the work of the Venezuelan artist Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912-1994). The exhibition will trace Gego's interest in "mak[ing] visible the invisible" from a rarely seen series of monotypes of the early 1950s to her delicate drawings without paper and tejeduras (woven paper pieces) of the late 1970s-1980s. Juxtaposing important artworks produced from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s and bringing two bodies of Gego's work into dialogue for the first time, Gego, Between Transparency and the Invisible , will foreground the critical role that drawing and printmaking played in the artist's oeuvre.
Curated by Mari Carmen Ramirez, Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Read Drawing Papers 69: Gego's Structural Systems.
Buy the catalogue.
Buy the catalogue: Gego: Between Transparency and the Invisible.
William Anastasi
For this exhibition in the Drawing Room, the artist William Anastasi will recreate seminal site-specific works dating from the mid-1960s. These early pieces are a testament to the artist's interest and pioneering efforts in site-specific projects, as well as in the medium of drawing. The artworks incisively explore the nature and behavior of drawing in the gallery space through different strategies, bringing to the surface questions about site and medium specificity, materiality, and the dematerialization of the art object. By focusing on the artist's expansive approach to the medium, the exhibition aims to contribute to a much deserved critical reconsideration of Anastasi's oeuvre.
Curated by João Ribas.
Read Drawing Papers 70: William Anastasi: Raw.
Buy the catalogue.
Drawing Out
Student Artwork from Drawing Connections
Drawing Out is an annual exhibition of student artwork from the Drawing Connections education program, which places teaching artists in downtown public schools. Through this program, The Drawing Center partners with four neighboring Lower Manhattan public schools to provide students with an in-depth visual art experience, culminating with this exhibition in the Center's galleries.
Yona Friedman
About Cities
Visionary architect and artist Yona Friedman is one of the most important and influential figures working in the fields of sustainable and self-initiated architecture. For his first U.S. solo exhibition, Friedman will present a spatial collage of his series of drawings from 1980, "A Better Life in Towns," as well as re-workings of his noted "Spatial City" drawings from 1958. Utilizing simple, everyday materials, Friedman will create an installation in the Drawing Room in collaboration with Normal Architecture Office that foregrounds his concerns with flexible, utilitarian, and portable design.
Read Drawing Papers 68: Yona Friedman: About Cities.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections Spring 2007
Levity: Selections Spring 2007 explores lightness as both a material and metaphoric condition in the work of fourteen emerging artists selected from the Viewing Program. Levity presents drawings made using a variety of methods and materials—including light itself—to investigate transparency, highlight a humorous view of mundane objects and situations, or compose whimsical and joyful imagery.
Buy the catalogue.
Eleanore Mikus
From Shell to Skin
Despite early success and a long teaching career at Cornell University, Eleanore Mikus seems to have largely been missed by history. The Drawing Center's fall exhibition Eleanore Mikus: From Shell to Skin , featuring a selection of the artist's early work, aims to redress this oversight. The exhibition includes drawings and paintings, featuring several of Mikus' "Tablets" from the early 1960s, as well as slightly later folded paper works.
Eleanore Mikus: From Shell to Skin is curated by artist Luis Camnitzer.
Buy the catalogue.
Christine Taylor Patten
micro/macro: 261 drawings
micro/macro: 261 drawings consists of 260 one-by-one-inch crow quill and ink drawings on three-inch paper (the micro) and one 21-by-103.5-inch study (the macro). A progression of images begun with a single dot in space, the complete series of thousands of drawings evolves through gradual movement, each drawing in the sequence referring to the preceding one. While strictly non-referential, the drawings evoke cosmic imagery – swirling clouds, clusters of planets, wave patterns – and have been numbered as years, celebrating two millennia.
Buy the catalogue.
Common Destination
Selections Fall 2006
Common Destination: Selections Fall 2006 features twelve emerging artists selected from the Viewing Program. The artists in Common Destination explore the fictions, histories, and futures of geopolitics through an expansive approach to drawing. The exhibition will run concurrently in the main gallery and the Drawing Room at 40 Wooster.
Read Drawing Papers 64: Common Destination: Selections Fall 2006.
Buy the catalogue.
Crust and Dirt's Instant Drawing Machine
Emerging artists Oliver Halsman Rosenberg (San Francisco) and Clint Taniguchi (Tokyo), who collaborate under the name Crust and Dirt, will exhibit wall drawings and scrolls made with their Instant Drawing Machine. Their playful images are generated from wishes requested via webcam from passersby in Barcelona, London, Stockholm, Shanghai, Tokyo, and New York City.
To see more of their work please visit www.instantdrawingmachine.com
Read Drawing Papers 63: Crust and Dirt's Instant Drawing Machine.
Buy the catalogue.
Eva Hesse
Eva Hesse Drawing is the first exhibition in over 20 years to focus on the role of drawing in the achievements of Eva Hesse (1936-1970), one of the most influential artists of the postwar era. The exhibition is a rare opportunity to view 150 of the Hesse's fascinating works on paper, including sketches and working notes that offer a behind-the-scenes look into the beginnings of many of her important sculptures. To illuminate the complex and rich crossover between drawing and sculpture in Hesse's work , Eva Hesse Drawing also features a critical selection of the artist's reliefs and test pieces.
The exhibition is co-curated by Catherine de Zegher and Elisabeth Sussman, Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at The Whitney Museum of American Art. Eva Hesse Drawing is organized by The Drawing Center, New York, and The Menil Collection, Houston. Exhibition Tour The Menil Collection, Houston: February 3 – April 23, 2006 The Drawing Center, New York: May 6 – July 15, 2006 The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles: August 6 – October 23, 2006 Walker Art Center, Minneapolis: November 12, 2006 – February 18, 2007
Read Drawing Papers 61: Eva Hesse Drawing: Circles and Grids.
Buy the catalogue.
Image: Eva Hesse, no title, 1968. Graphite, brown wash, and gouache, 12 1/8 x 12 3/16 in. © The Estate of Eva Hesse, Hauser & Wirth Zürich London
Stephen Posen
New York artist Stephen Posen will present an ambitious new drawing installation that explores scale, color, and the quality of line, engaging the walls, ceiling, and floor of the space, as well as the street outside it, with a circular trace of movement that has spatial, metaphorical, and poetic resonances. The title Dancer/Mirror refers to the relationships between movement and stasis, gesture and structure, and artist and viewer.
Buy the catalogue.
Drawing Out
Student Artwork from "Drawing Connections"
Drawing Out is an exhibition of student artwork from The Drawing Center's program that places teaching artists in downtown public schools. Featured in the Drawing Room at 40 Wooster Street will be ambitious collaborative projects made by students in the "Drawing Connections" program. Drawing Out will present cross-disciplinary group projects by 100 students from four participating schools: P.S. 42 Benjamin Altman School, P.S. 130M, and City-As-School and SoHo Communications Art Academy high schools.
Joëlle Tuerlinckx
Drawing Inventory
For her first New York exhibition, contemporary Belgian artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx will create a new project filled with stretch drawings, floating forms, moving points, and flat shapes that index the measurements and scale of the space. Lengths of thread, elastic bands, rolls of paper, drawn-out screenings, areas of light projection, and numbers of paces are all tools for tracing the experience of The Drawing Center as processed through Tuerlinckx's thinking.
Joëlle Tuerlinckx: Drawing Inventory is curated by Catherine de Zegher and Katherine Carl.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections Spring 2006
Analog Animation
Analog Animation presents recent work by 18 emerging artists who animate their drawings largely with "old-fashioned," hand-drawn animation techniques rather than digital media. Analog Animation will highlight a wide array of inventive animated works presented in a continuous projected loop and four site-specific installations. The artists use such disparate media as collage, imprints, silhouettes, light gels, and sliding window shades to create series of moving and transforming images that foreground the artist's hand and the act of drawing, rather than employ digital manipulation.
The exhibition, curated through The Drawing Center's Viewing Program, is part of the ongoing Selections series.
Buy the catalogue.
Acute Zonal Occult Outer
Selections Winter 2006
Fritz Welch with Elena Beelaerts and Jovi Schnell invited Rudolf Eb.er, Kim Jones, Alastair MacLennan, Ryoga Katsuma, Andre Stitt and Crank Sturgeon to create the installation Acute Zonal Occult Outer . This collaborative of emerging artists took over the Drawing Room with large-scale drawings that grew throughout the space and changed with performance and natural decay as the artists playfully explored the process of structures that become established and then deteriorate over time.
Acute Zonal Occult Outer was organized by Fritz Welch and selected through the Viewing Program.
Read Drawing Papers 58: Acute Zonal Occult Outer: Selections Winter 2006.
Buy the catalogue.
Persistent Vestiges
Drawing from the American-Vietnam War
Thirty years after the fall of Saigon, Persistent Vestiges brought together work by Vietnamese and American artists dating from the war-era and the present day. Hand-printing on the gallery walls by Nancy Spero and collages by Martha Rosler were in dialogue with photo-based mixed media work by Dinh Q. Lê and Binh Danh. Persistent Vestiges juxtaposed the work of artists from different generations who approach the subject of the war from various perspectives. The exhibition continued in the Drawing Room.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections Fall 2005
LineAge: Selections Fall 2005 featured nine emerging artists selected from the Viewing Program. The artists in LineAge explored the genealogy of the drawn line in terms of formal development, biographical content, or demarcations of identity.
Read Drawing Papers 55: LineAge: Selections Fall 2005.
Buy the catalogue.
Looking at the Spirits
Peter Minshall's Carnival Drawings
The acclaimed Trinidadian artist Peter Minshall works in the medium of mas , the costumed performance portion of Carnival. This exhibition of hundreds of small sketches conveyed the artist's intensive cumulative process of preparatory drawing as he envisions a full troupe of costumed performers in motion. Minshall has created scenarios for dozens of performances with hundreds of people, including Carnival and the closing ceremonies for the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia (1996).
Read Drawing Papers 56: Looking at the Spirits: Peter Minshall's Carnival Drawings.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections Summer 2005
Wall-to-Wall Drawing
Wall-to-Wall Drawing , curated through The Drawing Center's Viewing Program, featured wall drawings by seven emerging artists. Rather than creating murals or using the wall as a super-canvas, these artists delved into the function of the wall and its symbolic value. Whether making subtle graphite marks, bold drywall cut-outs, huge gestural lines, or digital media projections, all of the artists played with ideas of illusionism, transparency, depth, and materiality of the wall as it both supports and becomes their artwork. Through diverse approaches, the artists in Wall-to-Wall Drawing deconstructed the surface of the museum wall and developed complex relationships between the wall and the message of their work.
Buy the catalogue.
Zoe Keramea
Geometry of Paradox
This exhibition presented two- and three-dimensional works on paper by the under-recognized New York-based artist Zoe Keramea (b. 1955, Athens, Greece). Through the use of deceptively simple motifs—lines, knots, and geometrical shapes—Keramea produces "drawings" that unfold conceptually from a flat plane or sometimes emerge three-dimensionally in paper constructions. The exhibition reflected Keramea's sense of delight in visual challenges, and she invited viewers to involve themselves in the mental "unfolding" of the work.
Read Drawing Papers 54: Zoe Keramea: Geometry of Paradox.
Buy the catalogue.
Drawing Out
A joint exhibition of student drawings
The Drawing Center's Drawing Connections artworks on view at 40 Wooster Street Studio in a School artworks on view at 35 Wooster Street Drawing Connection s provides neighboring public schools with a museum visit and in-school art-making sessions with teaching artists, culminating in an exhibition of student artwork. Participating schools are: P.S. 42 Benjamin Altman School, P.S. 130M, and Soho Communications Art Academy and City-As-School high schools.
Nasreen Mohamedi
Lines among Lines
Nasreen Mohamedi: Lines among Lines presented the contemplative abstract drawings and photographs of the under-recognized Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990). Mohamedi's spare drawings were informed by ideas of modernity and by the geometry of Islamic architecture. The exhibition featured thirty of the artist's fine-line drawings created from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, as well as fifteen of her black-and-white photographs. The exhibition highlighted the exchange between drawing and photography throughout Mohamedi's work. In both media, the artist reduced structures and spaces to patterns of diagonals and planes.
Read Drawing Papers 52: Nasreen Mohamedi: Lines among Lines.
Buy the catalogue.
3 x Abstraction
New Methods of Drawing by Emma Kunz, Hilma af Klint, and Agnes Martin
This major touring historical exhibition, co-curated by Catherine de Zegher and Hendel Teicher, presented the work of three pioneering women artists: Hilma af Klint (Sweden, 1862–1944), Emma Kunz (Switzerland, 1892–1963), and Agnes Martin (Canada/U.S., 1912–2004). These three artists, each from a different generation spanning the last one hundred years, approached geometric abstraction not as formalism, but as a means of visualizing philosophical, scientific, and transcendental ideas. 3 x Abstraction introduced the work of af Klint and Kunz—which has been eclipsed for so long—and revisited Martin's work from a new perspective.
Buy the catalogue.
Richard Tuttle
It's A Room for 3 People
For this major two-part exhibition, contemporary American artist Richard Tuttle created a new body of work that expanded the traditional boundaries of drawing. In the main gallery, Tuttle arrayed five clusters of work—what he terms "villages"—consisting of both wall-mounted works and three-dimensional pieces. The exhibition highlighted Tuttle's extraordinary manipulation of a surprising variety of materials, including traditional drawing media, such as graphite, watercolor, charcoal, colored pencil, and gouache, as well as non-traditional media, such as plywood, string, cardboard, cloth, sawdust, glitter, and Styrofoam.
The second part of the exhibition opened in the Drawing Room on February 5, 2005 and featured a sixth "village" of two-dimensional and three-dimensional work, created in response to the five "villages" presented in the concurrent main gallery exhibition. The second part of this unique pairing of exhibitions offered a chance for Tuttle to be more experimental towards the questions about drawing that he raised in the first exhibition.
Richard Tuttle: It's A Room for 3 People toured to the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado from December 9, 2005 - February 5, 2006.
Read Drawing Papers 49: Richard Tuttle: Manifesto.
Buy the catalogue.
Field of Color
Tantra Drawings from India
Tantric drawings from Rajasthan in northeastern India feature beautiful symbolic and geometric images created to aid in meditation. The works in this exhibition were made in the last decade and are descendents of a 400-year long tradition in the practice of Hindu Tantrism.
Read Drawing Papers 50: Field of Color: Tantra Drawings from India.
Buy the catalogue.
León Ferrari
León Ferrari: Politiscripts was the first U.S. solo museum exhibition of the Argentinean artist León Ferrari (b. 1920). The exhibition, curated by Luis Camnitzer, focused on Ferrari's calligraphic drawings from the 1960s as they relate to his influential role in exploring art as a political agent.
Read Drawing Papers 48: León Ferrari: Politiscripts.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections Fall 2004
Talespinning presented the work of fourteen artists who explore allegories of the fantastical, the uncanny, and the mundane. Influenced by such diverse sources as literature, fairy tales, comics, newspapers, atlases, and hand-made signs, the artists produce works in which reality and fiction collide without resolution. The exhibition, curated through The Drawing Center's Viewing Program, is part of the ongoing Selections series.
Read Drawing Papers 47: Talespinning: Selections Fall 2004.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections Summer 2004
Playpen was a process-based exhibition that encouraged experimentation with the boundaries of space, drawing, and the role of the institution. Each of the artists created a project specifically for the exhibition, which was part of The Drawing Center's ongoing Selections series. Often depending on direct interaction with the audience for their ultimate meaning, the works in Playpen crossed the line between the sanctity of objects and the temporality of performative events.
Buy the catalogue.
Ocean Flowers
Impressions from Nature
Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature was a groundbreaking exhibition, curated by Catherine de Zegher and Carol Armstrong, tracing the role of drawing and botany in the development of early photography in the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing on a period of tremendous advances in graphic media, the exhibition featured over 300 beautiful natural-history illustrations from the Victorian era. Ocean Flowers highlighting the fertile exchange between drawings, "nature prints" (direct imprints from plants), hand-colored prints, mounted specimens, and "photogenic drawings" (photographs made without a camera).
Buy the catalogue.
Margaret Honda
Transfer Pictures
This exhibition was the Los Angeles-based Honda's (b. 1961) first New York City solo museum exhibition. The exhibition focused on a series of site-specific drawings that connect the natural sciences and the visual arts to the workings of memory and loss.
Read Drawing Papers 45: Margaret Honda: Transfer Pictures.
Buy the catalogue.
Giuseppe Penone
The Imprint of Drawing
Giuseppe Penone: The Imprint of Drawing was the first New York solo museum exhibition of the contemporary Italian artist Giuseppe Penone (b. 1947), who was first recognized for his work associated with Italy's Arte Povera movement in the 1960s. The exhibition focused on Penone's impressive contributions to drawing over his thirty-five-year career, and featured impressive large-scale drawings and a selection of sketches executed between 1968 and 2003.
Giuseppe Penone: The Imprint of Drawing was curated by Catherine de Zegher.
Buy the catalogue.
Helena Almeida
Inhabited Drawings
Helena Almeida Inhabited Drawings was the first time the work of the contemporary Portuguese artist Helena Almeida (b. 1934) was presented in a solo museum exhibition in the U.S. Curated by Isabel Carlos, the exhibition featured works from the late 1970s to the present that bridge photography, drawing, performance, and sculpture.
Read Drawing Papers 43: Helena Almeida: Inhabited Drawings.
Buy the catalogue.
Mappings of Being
Selections Winter 2003
Mappings of Being presented the drawings of three emerging artists who explore visual and philosophical approaches to mapping as a way to position oneself in the world: Maria Bussman (New York/Germany), Christoph Fink (Belgium), and Bogdan Hoffman (Germany).
Read Drawing Papers 41: Mappings of Being: Selections Winter 2003.
Buy the catalogue.
Mark Lombardi
Global Networks
The first major retrospective of New York artist Mark Lombardi (1951–2000) presented twenty-five of his complex and prescient diagrammatic drawings mapping secretive financial and political relationships.
Mark Lombardi: Global Networks was organized by Independent Curators International and curated by Robert Hobbs.
Buy the catalogue.
Internal Excess
Selections Fall 2003
This exhibition in the main gallery and the Drawing Room introduced the work of 14 emerging artists whose drawings explore means of interface between the protected interior and the reality of the outside world. The exhibition, curated through The Drawing Center's Viewing Program, is part of the ongoing Selections series
Read Drawing Papers 39: Internal Excess: Selections Fall 2003.
Buy the catalogue.
Róza El-Hassan
Róza El-Hassan: Drawings marked the artist's first museum exhibition in New York. El-Hassan created a wall drawing consisting of a delicate lattice of pencil lines encompassing the gallery.
Read Drawing Papers 38: Róza El-Hassan: Drawings.
Buy the catalogue.
The Stage of Drawing
Gesture and Act. Selected from the Tate Collection
The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act. Selected from the Tate Collection featured 145 works on paper selected by the artist Avis Newman in collaboration with Catherine de Zegher. The exhibition provided a memorable opportunity to view developments in drawing over the past three centuries through the eyes of an artist who has devoted most of her career to drawing. The exhibition featured a wide array of drawings from the mid-1700s to the 1970s by British and international artists and offered a remarkable survey of the formation of Tate's prestigious and rarely exhibited drawing collection. The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act. Selected from the Tate Collection was co-organized by The Drawing Center and Tate.
Read Drawing Papers 36: The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections Spring 2003
Street Selections
In a variation on the Selections series of exhibitions, The Drawing Center invited several emerging artists to develop drawing-based public art projects and performances. In addition to creating artworks for the Drawing Room, the artists presented performances and site-specific projects on Wooster Street in the vicinity of The Drawing Center, engaging and surprising passersby.
Read Drawing Papers 37: Street Selections: Spring 2003.
Buy the catalogue.
The Royal Art Lodge
Ask the Dust
Over a period of six years, The Royal Art Lodge produced a remarkably large body of work, including drawings, sculptures, videos, puppets, music, costumes, and dolls. Their low-tech aesthetic and crude-yet-precise draftsmanship, combined with a perversely idiosyncratic sense of humor, resulted in an outpouring of unforgettable hybrid creatures, absurd commentaries on the human condition, and an art of dynamic energy, whimsical charm, and expressive beauty. The exhibition, which was curated by Wayne Baerwaldt and Joseph R. Wolin, continued in the Drawing Room .
Buy the catalogue.
Selections Fall 2002
Abstract Tendencies
This group exhibition featured nine emerging artists: Joachim Bandau (Germany), Peter Dudek (Brooklyn), William Duty (Brooklyn), Nils Gjerdevic (Copenhagen, Denmark), Karl Jensen (Brooklyn), Kathleen McShane (Philadelphia), Ann Pibal (Brooklyn), Suzanne Song (New Haven), and Caroline Van Damme (Brussels, Belgium). Abstract Tendencies was characterized by arrangements of shapes and colors suggesting a tendency toward formal abstraction shared by each artist. The selected artists either re-examined concepts and philosophies of abstraction or presented unabashed representations of the real and everyday. The exhibition, curated through The Drawing Center's Viewing Program, is part of the ongoing Selections series.
Read Drawing Papers 33: Abstract Tendencies: Selections Fall 2002.
Buy the catalogue.
Cesar Paternosto and Cecilia Vicuña
DIS SOLVING: threads of water and light
Cecilia Vicuña (Chile/New York) and César Paternosto (Argentina/ New York) presented an exhibition project in progress. DIS SOLVING: threads of water and light incorporated drawings from the 1960s to the present, a wall drawing by Paternosto, and a three-dimensional drawing with hand-woven thread by Vicuña. Over the course of the exhibition, Vicuña expanded her installation of lines in space while Paternosto's drawings were gradually removed.
Read Drawing Papers 34: DIS SOLVING: Threads of Water and Light.
Buy the catalogue.
Kay Rosen
Collages 1999-2002
Kay Rosen: Collages 1999-2002 presented an adventurous and exploratory drawing series springing from the artist's larger body of text-based work. The works emerged from Rosen's continued fascination with language and commitment to eliciting new meanings from everyday objects through the layering of text and image. Through subtle combinations of found materials, Rosen coaxed a playful humor from words, her longtime subject matter. In a wall drawing, Rosen combined found paint (a hardware store's accidental mixture) with text, utilizing the physical space of the gallery as both page and canvas. Together, the collages and wall drawing created a poetic and compelling drawing-based installation.
Read Drawing Papers 32: Kay Rosen, Collages: 1999-2002.
Buy the catalogue.
25th Anniversary Benefit Selections Exhibition
On the occasion of its 25th Anniversary, The Drawing Center invited all of the 750 artists whose work had been featured in Selections or Drawing Room exhibitions since 1977 to participate in a special 25th Anniversary Benefit Selections Exhibition. The exhibition featured nearly 400 drawings by the invited artists.
Read Drawing Papers 31: 25th Anniversary Benefit Selections Exhibition.
Buy the catalogue.
Clarina Bezzola
Clarina Bezzola's Fluid was a metaphorical installation about circulation through barriers and skins. It included ceramic, metal, and fabric pieces that connected drawn elements on the walls and floor. The drawings also served to create spatial illusions hinting at the presence of perceptual barriers. According to the artist, her work is her body, and the installation, although existing in the gallery, "should always be thought of as a part of me." Her use of flower patterns underscored the surfaces that wrap and hide the inner lives of her forms; they provide a "hypocritical way of covering up." Bezzola's pieces are often wearable and used in performances. The exhibition was accompanied by the artist's performance of "Lamentation," an operatic improvisation in which, dressed in a sculpture of her own making, she made use of her classically trained voice.
Read Drawing Papers 30: Sarah Oppenheimer and Clarina Bezzola.
Buy the catalogue.
Ellsworth Kelly
Tablet: 1949–1973
Ellsworth Kelly, Tablet: 1949–1973 presented 180 fascinating never before seen drawings by the major contemporary artist Ellsworth Kelly. The artist selected 188 of his working drawings to be included in the exhibition, which was curated by Yve-Alain Bois. The exhibition provided a intimate look into Kelly's working process during a prolific and pivotal period in the artist's career.
Read Drawing Papers 29: Ellsworth Kelly: A Conversation.
Buy the catalogue.
Sarah Oppenheimer
An installation by emerging artist Sarah Oppenheimer, Hallway marked the artist's first museum exhibition in New York. Addressing the issue of how people interact with physical and architectural spaces, Oppenheimer temporarily converted the Drawing Room into a hallway, the dimensions of which she altered during the exhibition in response to the ways in which groups of experimental subjects navigated the space.
Read Drawing Papers 30: Sarah Oppenheimer and Clarina Bezzola.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections Winter 2002
Realistic Means
Realistic Means featured six artists from disparate regions of the U.S. and abroad who employ realism as a means of exploring issues like deconstruction, meditation, obsession, and memory. For the these artists, the choice of realism is an informed one, untainted by their longing to be validated as skillful, and guided solely by the need to solve and express particular problems at a given moment. Realistic Means was curated by Luis Camintzer.
Read Drawing Papers 28: Selections Winter 2002: Realistic Means.
Buy the catalogue.
Ellen Gallagher
Ellen Gallagher: Preserve introduced a new series of mixed-media drawings taken from advertisements in mid-century black culture magazines. The exhibition also featured the artist's first sculptural project: a three-dimensional jungle gym construction.
Ellen Gallagher: Preserve originated at the Des Moines Art Center and was organized by Jeff Fleming.
Buy the catalogue.
Suzan Frecon
Drawing painting
Suzan Frecon: drawing painting included fifty watercolors that reflected Frecon's outstanding contribution to the field of drawing over the past twenty five years, during which time she focused on reaching a higher and more pure form of abstraction in her art.
Buy the catalogue.
Anna Maria Maiolino
A Life Line/Vida Afora
This major exhibition marked the first time that the work of Anna Maria Maiolino was the subject of a solo exhibition in the United States. The exhibition featured one hundred drawings from Maiolino's thirty-five-year career, including works on paper that involve folds, cuts, tears, hand-sewn seams, and flowing ink. The exhibition encompassed the entire scope of the artist's drawing practice and focused on her use of open-ended and inclusive forms that examine the personal and political connotations of space, language, and geography.
Anna Maria Maiolino: A Life Line/Vida Afora was curated by Catherine de Zegher.
Buy the catalogue.
Heavenly Visions
Shaker Gift Drawings and Gift Songs
Heavenly Visions: Shaker Gift Drawings and Gift Song s featured approximately 130 drawings, song manuscripts, and other texts inspired by the unique spiritual practices and beliefs of the American religious community known as the Shakers.
The exhibition was curated by France Morin, and the drawings and texts were lent by several major public and private collections around the United States.
Read Drawing Papers 23: Heavenly Visions: Shaker Gift Drawings and Gift Songs.
Buy the catalogue.
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger
Eurydice Series
This exhibit was the first U.S. solo exhibition of drawings by Israeli artist Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. Ettinger's enigmatic drawings were drawn from her ongoing Eurydice series, in which she addresses issues of exile, memory, human relationships, and history through layered images of photocopied archival photographs and screen-like veils of ink.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections Fall 2001
12 Views
Buy the catalogue.
Elena del Rivero
Performance Drawings
Elena del Rivero's installation comprised large-sized sheets of handmade paper that were part of a year-long performance. The artist tracked a year in her life by placing these large-sized sheets of paper all around the floors of her home and then working on them in her studio. Each sheet of paper was then rotated from one location to another until it had visited every area of her home and was thus marked by all aspects of her life.
Buy the catalogue.
Between Street and Mirror
The Drawings of James Ensor
Between Street and Mirror focused on the most creative and prolific period of the innovative draftsman James Ensor. Between 1880 and 1895 the artist experimented with a wide range of subjects and techniques, notably etching and large-scale drawing. Ensor's creative production bridges the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and resists an easy fit into any single movement or group.
The Drawing Center's exhibition of over 90 drawings, curated by Robert Hoozee and Catherine de Zegher, covered the stylistic evolution of Ensor's practice, from an early Impressionist style to the highly personal and grotesque nature of the later works.
Read Drawing Papers 21: Between Street and Mirror: The Drawings of James Ensor.
Buy the catalogue.
Christopher Taggart
Performance Drawings
Christopher Taggart makes animated sculptures of plastic, metal, magnets, motors, pens, and glassine. Twittering contraptions, they are seemingly single-minded yet inscrutable in their pursuit of drawing. At The Drawing Center, two of Taggart's machines were let loose in the gallery, each beginning a work as the exhibition opened, then running continually until the show closed.
Buy the catalogue.
Erwin Wurm
Performance Drawings
The Austrian artist Erwin Wurm provided instructional sketches that designated the body's interaction with common objects such as bowls, newspapers, cans, buckets, sticks, and balls. Wurm's exhibition was comprised of drawings and objects, all arranged on or in proximity to a platform stage that nearly filled the gallery. The artist performed on the opening night, and the preponderance of stage space in the installation demanded some kind of action of the audience members or visitors.
Buy the catalogue.
Allison Knowles
Performance Drawings
When Alison Knowles upends one of her large bean turners–which consist of beans enclosed in earth-toned handmade paper–she brings about a pummeling cascade of sound. They also have a life of their own; any shift, such as that brought on by a change of light or humidity, and they let loose a small pattering. Knowles wove together these sonic events with spoken poetry during her performances in the Drawing Room.
Buy the catalogue.
Milan Grygar
Performance Drawings
Milan Grygar's work is inspired by the rhythmic taps and scratches that attend the making of marks on paper. His drawings capture the sonic existence of the emerging image, its acoustic coming-into-being. For Grygar, the "acoustic event" would "from that point on be stronger for me than color." Sound is then the juncture between hand and the space it moves through, between the drawing tool (be it a hand alone or an object driven by a hand) and a sheet of paper.
Buy the catalogue.
Rosemarie Trockel
Metamorphoses and Mutations
Rosemarie Trockel: Metamorphoses and Mutation s, organized by the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and curated by Jonas Storsve, was the first New York museum exhibition of the drawings of the contemporary German artist Rosemarie Trockel. The Drawing Center's presentation comprised over one hundred drawings, including a number of new works created specifically to premiere in this context.
Read Drawing Papers 18: Rosemarie Trockel: Metamorphoses and Mutations.
Buy the catalogue.
Norval Morriseau/Copper Thunderbird
Draw and Tell: Lines of Transformation
This exhibition of drawings by First Nations artist Norval Morrisseau (Anishnaabe, b. 1932) consisted of over fifty visionary works made between 1972 and 1973, while the artist was in prison. The exhibition featured a series of drawings that depict highly charged images based on Morriseau's personal transformation of pictographic traditions.
Norval Morriseau/Copper Thunderbird: Draw and Tell: Lines of Transformation was co-curated by Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster.
Read Drawing Papers 19: Draw and Tell: Lines of Transformation by Norval Morriseau/Copper Thunderbird.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections Winter 2001
Mária Chilf, Royce Howes, Jessica Hutchins, Yun-Fei Ji, Grace Markman, Corey McCorkle, Carolyn Swiszcz, Scott Teplin, and Susan Tiger
From Sierra Maestra to La Habana
The Drawings of Chago
Santiago "Chago" Armada (1937-1995) established himself as the cartoonist of the Cuban Revolution and went on to inspire the next generation of Cuban artists. Chago became a symbol of revolutionary purity, and was respected for his criticism "from within the Revolution."
From Sierra Maestra to La Habana , curated by Luis Camnitzer, comprised approximately fifty drawings from different periods of Chago's oeuvre.
Read Drawing Papers 17: From Sierra Maestra to La Habana: The Drawings of Chago.
Buy the catalogue.
Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux
The major exhibition Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux investigated Michaux's graphic works in tandem with his poetic practice, addressing the artist-poet's research into the passages between "writing" and "drawing." The exhibition, which took its title from Michaux's extensive body of untitled drawings and from Passages , his book of poetic writings, was curated by Catherine de Zegher and Florian Rodari.
Read Drawing Papers 14: Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux.
Buy the catalogue.
Adrianne Gallinari
Wall Drawings
For her first U.S. exhibition, The Drawing Center invited Brazilian artist Adrianne Gallinari to create a new work directly on the walls of its Drawing Room. Born in Belho Horizonte, Brazil, in 1965, Gallinari creates a kind of visual poetry through drawings that combine figures and writing so as to defy easy legibility.
Read Drawing Papers 15: Adrianne Gallinari: Wall Drawings.
Buy the catalogue.
Korwa Drawings
Contemporary Tribal Works on Paper from Central India
The first New York exhibition of drawings by the Hill Korwa, a tribe in Central India, Korwa Drawings featured works that explore the boundaries between drawing and writing. The works in the exhibition were collected by the French poet Franck Andre Jamme who stayed with the Hill Korwa in 1996. Often the drawn signs in the work seem to simulate language, but, they are in fact entirely or nearly non-referential due to the tribe's illiteracy.
Korwa Drawings was curated by Franck Andre Jamme and Catherine de Zegher.
Read Drawing Papers 13: Korwa Drawings: Contemporary Tribal Works on Paper from Central India.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections Fall 2000
Grady Gerbracht, Glenn Allen Grafelman, Geraldine Lau, Mary Lum, Miranda Maher, Julie Mehretu, Lucas Monaco, and Oona Stern
Ania Soliman
For her first solo exhibition, Ania Soliman presented Biohazards , a series of four large-scale drawings that reflect upon the representation of epidemics in the media. Soliman works with wax medium and pigment on paper and her palette is taken from the four colors that comprise the printing process: yellow, magenta, cyan, and black. Each of the drawings consists of one of these color choices and reproduces stills from the Discovery Channel's Ends of the Earth: Killer Virus series.
Read Drawing Papers 12: Ania Soliman: Biohazards.
Buy the catalogue.
Mark Manders
Room with Several Night Drawings and One Reduced Night Scene
For his first solo exhibition in the United States, Mark Manders created a new installation as part of his series Self Portrait as a Building , a work in progress that the artist has been developing for the past fourteen years. Manders' installation combined works on paper with wall drawings, sculptures, and everyday objects, such as cups and ropes.
Read Drawing Papers 9: Mark Manders: Room with Several Night Drawings and One Reduced Night Scene.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections Summer 2000
Nina Lola Bachhuber, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Amy Cutler, Georganne Deen, Margaret Evangeline, and Edward Pien
The Prinzhorn Collection
Traces upon the Wunderblock
The Prinzhorn Collection: Traces upon the Wunderblock was the first New York exhibition of a legendary and influential group of works amassed during the 1920s by the psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn. The collection, which is based at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, comprises drawings made by psychiatric patients who suffered social exclusion, psychic illness, and isolation–experiences that are common, yet often erased from collective memory. The Drawing Center's exhibition marked the last time that the collection was lent prior to the opening of the museum at the University of Heidelberg dedicated to the collection.
Read Drawing Papers 7: The Prinzhorn Collection: Traces upon the Wunderblock.
Buy the catalogue.
Cyrilla Mozenter
Very Well Saint
The exhibition consisted of a series of drawings, the title of which was adapted from the phrase "very well saints," which was used by Gertrude Stein in her libretto for Virgil Thompson's opera Four Saints in Three Acts . With an inspired sense of play that can be likened to Stein's inventive use of language, Mozenter's drawings reflect a singsong pattern of interrelated visual references.
Read Drawing Papers 8: Cyrilla Mozenter: Very Well Saint.
Buy the catalogue.
James Castle
House Drawings
The first New York exhibition of works by James Castle, a noted self-taught artist from Idaho, featured approximately one hundred drawings and paper constructions. Curated by Jay Tobler, James Castle: House Drawings featured Castle's prodigious visual diary of his home environments.
Read Drawing Papers 6: James Castle: House Drawings.
Buy the catalogue.
The Body of the Line
Eisenstein's Drawings
The Body of the Line was the first U.S. museum exhibition of drawings by the influential Russian filmmaker Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (1898-1948), who revolutionized the world of cinema with such renowned films as The Battleship Potemkin (1925). The exhibition offered a rare opportunity to view striking works on paper by one of the seminal figures of early motion-picture direction. The exhibition was produced by the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, Montreal, and curated by Jean Gagnon.
Read Drawing Papers 4: The Body of the Line: Eisenstein's Drawings.
Buy the catalogue.
Nic Hess
[Together Now]
To create his installations, Nic Hess pairs two unlikely materials–charcoal drawings and adhesive tape. Tape-based images slot themselves alongside charcoal ones forming a jumbled assemblage. Images either flow into each other or jostle for momentary attention. However they are combined, tape and charcoal become equally irreverent–an unexpectedly congenial team–one on holiday from the realm of high art, the other from its workaday existence.
Read Drawing Papers 5: Nic Hess: [Together Now].
Buy the catalogue.
Another City for Another Life
Constant's New Babylon
The first major U.S. presentation of the work of Constant and his New Babylon project, this exhibition was organized for The Drawing Center by Mark Wigley, based on the retrospective he curated for the Witte de With in Rotterdam in 1998. Another City for Another Life: Constant's New Babylon focused on Constant's tremendous contribution to visionary architecture through the practice of drawing and offered an in-depth consideration of the artist's futuristic project.
Read Drawing Papers 3: Another City for Another Life: Constant's New Babylon.
Buy the catalogue.
Darkness Like a Dream
Nineteenth-Century Sandpaper Drawings
This exhibition featured the little-known medium of sandpaper drawings, popular in the mid-nineteenth century, made on panel or board covered with marble dust. Artists, both trained and untrained, transformed this shimmering surface with charcoal and/or pastel, creating haunting images that were marked by deep blacks and shining whites. Predominant themes included landscapes, seascapes, and city views as well as memorials and biblical and historical scenes.
Read Drawing Papers 2: Darkness Like a Dream: Nineteenth-Century Sandpaper Drawings.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections Fall 1999
Katharina Grosse, Honda Takeshi, Steve Roden, Barbara Camilla Tucholski, and Paul Zawisha
A Measured Quietude
Contemporary Irish Drawings
Liadin Cooke, Maud Cotter, Colin Darke, Richard Gorman, Rôisín Lewis, Fergus Martin, William McKeown, and Fionnuala Ní Chiosáin
John Kindness
Drawn from Artists' Collections
Drawn from Artists' Collections featured selections from the drawing collections of major contemporary artists and included works by Balthus, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joseph Beuys, Pierre Bonnard, Chris Burden, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Cézanne, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Gauguin, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Gustav Klimt, Franz Kline, Brice Marden, Henri Matisse, Juan Miró, Robert Motherwell, Elizabeth Murray, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Susan Rothenberg, Georges Seurat, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and Andy Warhol. Drawn from Artists' Collections was organized by Ann Philbin and Jack Shear.
Buy the catalogue.
Raymond Pettibon
This major exhibition featured over 500 drawings as well as a selection of artist's books, fanzines, and record covers by Los Angeles-based artist Raymond Pettibon. This retrospective look at two decades of the artist's work marked the first major museum presentation of Pettibon's art and was organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago.
Selections Winter 1999
Paul Morrison, Perry Roberts, and Richard Wright
Willem de Kooning
Drawing Seeing/Seeing Drawing
Willem de Kooning: Drawing Seeing/Seeing Drawing , organized by guest curator Klaus Kertess, presented seventy works on paper by the incredibly influential artist Willem de Kooning. The exhibition focused on four groups of drawings de Kooning made between 1958 and the late 1970s. De Kooning regularly created series of drawings, sometimes continuing them intermittently over a decade. The presentation of four of these series afforded a close view of the artist's working process and his constant reinvention of mark making.
Buy the catalogue.
Trisha Brown
Free Measures: Drawings
Selections Fall 1998
Haluk Akakçe, Jonathan Callan, Yané Calovski, Greg Chann, Amanda Guest, Maureen McQuillan, Jennifer Monick, and Gert Verhoeven
Jayashree Chakravarty
Read the New York Times review here.
Selections Summer 1998
Laylah Ali, Molly Barker, Noah Erenberg, Christopher Faust, Frederick Hayes, Georgie Hopton, and Christopher Johanson
Tomoko Takahashi
Shadows of a Hand
The Drawings of Victor Hugo
Shadows of a Hand was the first museum exhibition in the United States devoted to the drawings of Victor Hugo. The exhibition featured over one hundred works from the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; Maison de Victor Hugo in Paris; Musée Victor Hugo de Villequier; Musée du Louvre; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon; The Art Institute of Chicago; and private collections. The works were selected by Ann Philbin and guest curator Florian Rodari.
Buy the catalogue.
Joan Waltemath
Parasite On View: Mel Bochner, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper to Be Viewed as Art
Selections Spring 1998
Carmel Buckley, Enrique Chagoya, Leona Christie, Nadia Coen, Marcel Dzama, Teo Gonzalez, Douglas Navarra, Jorge Nesbitt, Roberto Obregon, Stephen Sollins, Xawery Wolski, and Jane Yeomans
Selections Winter 1998
Ingrid Calame, Miriam Dym, Mark Grotjahn, Gerhard Mayer, and Stephanie Syjuco
William Kentridge
Drawings for Projection
William Kentridge: Drawings for Projection featured the South African artist's charcoal drawings, which he used to create his short animated films in the mid-1990s, when apartheid was being dismantled. In Kentridge's distinctive additive animation technique, a single drawing represents a shot of the sequence. Filled with remorse and violence, the drawings and the films unfolded the narrative of his country's complex past and the scars it has left.
Selections Winter 1997
Gary Cruz, Ben Polsky, Hyun-Sook Song, Fumio Tachibana, and Dodi Wexler
Alessandro Pessoli
Alessandro Pessoli creates works, that, as the artist has noted, are like a stormy flood of figures, voids, signs, words, and writings outlined in light. Using a unique process that reserves areas of untouched white paper, Pessoli presents a world of spidery figures, looming phantoms, and lacy architectural forms all illuminated and framed by intricate and exuberant patterns. As if to signify the self-sufficiency of this imaginary world, Pessoli allows all of the ink to absorb in the paper's surface, rendering his shimmering forms at an always elusive distance.
Selections Fall 1997
Johannes Kahrs, David Nelson, Kathy Prendergast, and Mike Stevenson
Margaret Kilgallen
Margaret Kilagallen's installation was inspired by hobos, drifters, and street musicians and executed with a visual sensibility that admired all things made by the human hand. Her floor-to-ceiling installation of appealing murals, evocative wall-mounted arrangements of wooden paintings and rough-hewn objects saluted vagabonds—especially women—who know how to survive.
Tracing Taiwan
Contemporary Works on Paper
Tracing Taiwan , organized by guest curator Alice Yang, explored contemporary developments in drawing in Taiwan, focusing particularly on its relationship to Chinese artistic traditions.
Daniel G. Verbis
Rajasthani Miniatures
The Welch Collection from the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University
Rajasthani Miniatures featured over seventy miniatures dating from the late-fifteenth to the late-nineteenth centuries. Nearly all of the works presented were created for Rajputs, members of the India's princely caste ( kshatriya ), and produced in the northwestern Indian province of Rajasthan.
Buy the catalogue.
Morgan O'Hara
The Shape of Discourse
Tacita Dean
The Roaring Forties: Seven Boards in Seven Days
Selections Spring 1997
Oshin Saginian, Pauline Stella Sanchez, and Shahzia Sikander
Selections Winter 1997
D-L Alvarez, David Bunn, Claudia Goulette, Mary Judge, and Mark Lombardi
Plains Indians Drawings 1865-1935
Pages from a Visual History
Plains Indians Drawings 1865-1935: Pages from a Visual History was the first extensive exhibition of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Native American ledger drawings. The exhibition provided a panoramic view of the achievements of visual artists from the Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Arapaho tribes.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections Fall 1996
Ignasi Aballí, Ginny Bishton, Caryl Davis, and Laurie Reid
Selections Summer 1996
Louise Belcourt, Nina Bovasso, Marco Breuer, Marsha Cottrell, Tomas Esson, Jessie Joo, Sharon Louden, Helen Marden, Randy Moore, Cyril Olanier, Mario Perez, H. A. Rodriguez-Mora, Matt Schwede, Rodney Taylor, Lynne Woods Turner, Ivan Vera, and Eric Wolske
Louise Bourgeois
Cultural Economies
Histories from the Alternative Arts Movement, NYC
Cultural Economies was initiated through a call for exhibition proposals from the New York State Council on the Arts asking alternative spaces to evaluate and assess the alternative arts movement, its history, and its contributions to the field of contemporary art. Organized by guest curator Julie Ault, Cultural Economies offered an economically and socially contextualized view of alternative practices and structures in New York City over the previous twenty years.
Buy the catalogue.
Wall Drawings 1996
Barry McGee, Tania Mouraud, Mark Dean Veca
Selections Winter 1995
Silvia Bachli, Steve Greene, Jeff Krueger, Thomas Müller, Carsten Nicolai, and Allyson Strafella
Pierced Hearts & True Love
A Century of Drawings for Tattoos
Philip Guston's Poem-Pictures
Drawings from the Albertina
Landscape in the Age of Rembrandt
Selections Spring 1995
Stephen Dean, Michael Ensminger, Teresita Fernandez, Christopher Hammerlein, Alice Helander, Joyce Lightbody, Chris Ofili, Barry Ratoff, Anne Marie Schneider, and George Stoll
Selections from Brazil
Fernando Gomes, Ester Grinspum, Leonilson, and Ernesto Neto
Selections from Brazil presented the drawings of four contemporary Brazilian artists: Fernanda Gomes, Ester Grinspum, Leonilson, and Ernesto Neto.
Mira Schendel
Selections Winter 1994
Mirriam Alharar, Peter Huttinger, Donnamaria Bruton, Paul Henry Ramirez, and Luca Buvoli
Selections Fall 1994
Installations by Jeff Beall, Brad Brown, Larry Krone, and Kara Walker
Richard Serra
Weight & Measure Drawings
This exhibition featured a series of large-scale paint-stick-on-hiromi-paper drawings by Richard Serra, who, though widely recognized for his mastery of monumental sculptural works in steel, here endows the typically fragile medium of drawing with an almost geological heft.
Buy the catalogue.
Drawing Towards a Distant Shore
Selections from Portugal
This exhibition featured six artists who span two generations and represent the diversity of current art production in Portugal: Rui Chafes, Gaëtan, Ana Hatherly, Ana Jotta, Pedro Proenca, and Joana Rosa. Drawings Towards a Distant Shore was organized by guest curator Dan Cameron.
Buy the catalogue.
Selection Spring 1994
Kevin Bolyard, Judy Glantzman, Arturo Herrera, Yael Kanarek, and Keith Mayerson
Selections Winter 1994
Jill Baroff, Jesse Sadia, Sara Sosnowy, Bill Wheelock, Bruce Witsiepe, William Wood
The Return of the Cadavre Exquis
The Return of the Cadavre Exquis featured over 600 collaborative drawings by contemporary artists from around the world. The culmination of a two-year drawing project, the exhibition was composed of contemporary drawings based on the Surrealist parlor game, Exquisite Corpse, as well as a selection of works by Surrealist practitioners of the game. The exhibition was organized by The Drawing Center and Ingrid Schaffner, who initiated the project with the artists Kim Jones and Leonard Titzer.
Buy the catalogue.
Immanent Domain
Michael De Jong, Tom Knechtel, Robert Medvedz, Josie Robertson, Rick Schaefer, Faith Wilding
Charles Burchfield
The Sacred Woods: A Centennial Exhibition
Odilon Redon
Selections from the Woodner Family Collection
This exhibition of works by the French artist Odilon Redon (1840-1916) focused on the artist's haunting charcoal noir drawings from the mid-1860s through the 1890s. These shadowy drawings provide a view into Redon's mysterious world of dream landscapes, psychically charged mythological scenes, religious subjects, and apparitional portraits that appear to surface from the depth of the artist's unconscious.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections Spring 1993
Drew Beattie & Daniel Davidson, Joseph Cavallaro, Roland Flexner, Jim Hodges, Siobhan Liddell, Giorgia Marsh, and Karen Yasinsky
Selections Winter 1993
Cornelia Cottiati, Charles Crumb, Carl Fudge, Kenneth Goldsmith, Janine Gordon, Quentin Morris, Eric Wolf
Wall Drawings 1992
Nicole Eisenman, Celia Alvarez Munoz, and Gary Simmons
Selections Fall '92
Stavit Allwies, Dan Asher, Sigrid McCabe, Margaret Curtis, Eliza Jackson, Sowon Kwon, John Patterson, John-Paul Philippe, Norman Steck, Thaddeus Strode
Drawings from Windsor Castle
Mike Glier & The Alphabet of Lili
This exhibition, commissioned by The Drawing Center, consisted of a series of twenty-six personal drawings addressing elemental concerns of birth, death, sexuality, gender, and childrearing. The acrylic and charcoal drawings unfold as an illustrated alphabet for Glier's daughter, Lili.
Buy the catalogue.
Darkness Visible
Mark Beyer, Charles Burns, Susan Coe, Gary Panter, Suzan Pitt, Gig Wailgum, and Sue Williams
Selections Winter 1992
Salvador Casco, Dawn Clements, Janet Cohen, Cub Fahlen, Ruth Kahn, Linda Matalon, Theodore Svenningse, Sally Webster
Marking Time: Contemporary Wall Drawings
Angela Buchlock, Jacob el Hanah, John Reilly, Nancy Rubins
Selections Fall 1991
Robert Blanchon, Kavin Buck, Charles Castillo, Ruth Lieberman, Megan Williams
Seeing Through "Paradise"
Artists and the Terezin Concentration Camp
Seeing Through "Paradise" presented works by artists imprisoned from 1941 to 1945 at Terezin, Czechoslovakia. Terezin was an eighteenth-century fortress town taken over by the Nazis in 1941 to use as a transit camp for Jews. The Nazis collected musicians, poets, scholars, and visual artists, placing them in workshops where they were forced to create propaganda art. Some of these artists gained access to art supplies from the workshops and were able to create other more honest works about life in the concentration camp.
The exhibition included drawings by Friedl Dicker-Brandeisova, Pietr Kien, Karel Fleischmann, Fritta (Fritz Taussig), and Helga (Weissora) Hoskova.
Picasso's "Parade" from Paper to Stage
The exhibition Picasso's "Parade" from Paper to Stage was the first exhibition to focus on Picasso's drawings for the ballet Parade . First performed by Diaghelev's Ballets Russes in 1917, Parade came about as a collaborative effort between the leading modernists in the visual and performing arts respectively, who were both living in Paris at that time.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections from the San Francisco / Bay Area
John Beech, Rolando Castellon, David Dashiell, Dawn Flying, Girl with Arms Akimbo/ Boys with Arms Akimbo, Hung Liu, Jim Melchert, Brett Reichman, M. Louise Stanley, Larry Thomas
Selections Winter 1991
Dove Bradshaw, Steven Evans, Robert Goldman, Bruno Jakob, John Larabee, Brad Melamed, Stafanie Nagorka, Jack Pierson
Selections 50
Manuel Acevedo, Fernando Colon, Fred Holland, Wen Yi Hou, Dan McCarthy, Marlene McCarthy, Julie Melton, Howard Schwartzberg
Theatre on Paper
Theatre on Paper explored theatre design from 1608 to the present, and included drawings for sets, costumes, stage properties, posters, and programs. The exhibition featured drawings from the collection of the Theatre Museum, London, by Natalia Gontcharova, Jean Louis Berain, Pablo Picasso, Clarkson Stanfield, Juan Gris, Leon Bakst, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Nash, David Hockney, Daniel Rabel, and many other artists.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections 49
Billy Copley, Robert Dandarov, Paula Hayes, Jondi Keane, David Knudsvig, Leonid Lerman, Michale Merchant, Gary Pearson, Paul A. Ramirez, Keith Rodan, Barbara Rogers, Matthew Senley, Melissa Wolf
Selections 48
Carol Burch-Brown, Chak, Paul Dickerson, John H. Greer, Ona Lindquist, Thomas Mellins, Renee McPhail, Martin Nederpelt, David Nelson, Anna Maria Portela, Angel Rodriguez-Diaz, Walter Sipser
Selections 47
John Allen, Janine Antoni, Robert C. Baker, Isabel De Obaldia, Gudrun Mertes Frady, Bernhard Garbert, Greg Hilton, Arlan Huang, Ezra Kohn, Stuart Lachs, Christopher Lesnewski, Roderic Matthews, Mary Murphy, John Sapp, Corinne Segal
Selections 46
Andre Schutz, Ellen Banks, Tina Chaden, Marek Czarnecki, Daniel Ford, Peggy Diggs, Batu Y. Jazchid, Glenn Ligon, Joman C. M. Lin, Emil Lukas, Iain Machell, Ilana Salama-Ortar, Davis Schafer, Scott Senseny, Sohayla Vafai, Sheila White, Dale Williams, Lawrence L. Zajac
Inigo Jones
Complete Architectural Drawings
This exhibition presented one hundred drawings by the renowned architect of the Elizabethan era, Inigo Jones. Inigo Jones: Complete Architectural Drawings was the first major exhibition of the drawings by this master draughtsman, who transformed architectural drawing into an art form of the highest level, and included all of Jones's major architectural drawings, supplemented by a selection of his finest figurative and scene designs.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections 45
Chuck Hitner, Susana Jacobson, Hl Lum, Claire McConaugy, John N.H. Parker, Elizabeth Roseblum, Martina Siebert, Anita Siegel, Toni Simon
Selections 44
Yeong Gill Kim, Vivienne Koorland, David Moriarty, Richard Moninsky, Diane Olivier, Ann Marie Ragone, Kunie Sugiura, Daniel B. Tisdale, Ansy Watel,
Selections 43
Jarrett Huddleston, David Lawter, Peter Levinson, Alison Ruttan, Eran Shakine, Jon Tower, Melissa Townsend, Bradley Webster
Influences of the Untaught: Contemporary Drawings
Trena Banks, Beverly Buchanan, Tom Duncan, Denis Gaston, Bert L. Long, Jr., Aminah Brenda L. Robinson, Alison Saar, Josette Urso, Jeff Way
Selections 42
Eve Ascheim, Amanda Barrow, Jane Fine, Nancy Friese, Gary Goldberg, Prudencio Irazabal, Michael Kareken, Tom Koken, Kathleen E. Kucka, Thomas Lyon Mills, Michael Mulhern, Kathryn Myers, Carol Parlato, Herman Steins, Po Shu Wang, Harvey Weiss
Creative Copies
Interpretive Drawings from Michelangelo to Picasso
Creative Copies: Interpretative Drawings from Michelangelo to Picasso brought together sixty-nine drawings spanning the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries to explore the phenomenon of one artist copying the work of another. All of the drawings in the exhibition were copies, variations, or interpretations of other works of art, ranging from the sculpture of classical antiquity to the work of immediate predecessors.
The exhibition was organized by Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann and included works by Michelangelo, Masaccio, Durer, Mantegna, Rembrandt, Leonardo, Delacroix, Rubens, Ingres, and Holbein, among others.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections 41
Lisa Dawn Gold, Roland Houston, Steven Montgomery, Cindy Poorbaugh, Rebecca Quaytman, Wongi Sul, Pennie Umbrico, Fred E. Valentine, Michael Zansky
Selections 40
Robert Di Matteo, Cynthia Fusillo, Liz Giordano, Christine Hughes, Maria T.D. Inocencio, E. Slame Krieger, Ann Tecla Lundquist, Marilyn Murphy, John A. Sebasteanski
Otto Wagner
Otto Wagner: Drawings featured the most comprehensive selection of Wagner drawings ever exhibited in the United States. Otto Wagner (1841-1918), Vienna's foremost architect at the turn of the century, is credited with taking the first steps in freeing architecture from a dependence on historical styles. Included in the exhibition are drawings that clearly document Wagner's working method: freehand sketches, pencil drawings to scale, and final drawings in ink and watercolor.
The exhibition was organized by Otto Antonia Graf and August Sarnitz of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections 39
Selections 39 is a group exhibition of new work by ten emerging artists chosen through the Center's unique Viewing Program. Included in Selections 39 are: Betsy Berne, Patti Blau, Leslie Enders, Beverly Fishman, Mylo Freeman, Robert Hoerlein, Robbin Murphy, Tony Serio, Tim Spelios, and William Staples.
Selections 38
Selections 38 is an exhibition of unique works on paper which challenge contemporary definitions of drawing. This presentation marks a significant exhibition opportunity for each of the seven emerging artists included. All of the artists in Selections 38 participated in the Artists' Viewing Program, including Open Portfolio Day at the Center. Artists included are Chris Garnett, Owen Gray, David Jeffrey, Max Miller, Daniele Robbiani, Hugh Steers, and John R. Thompson.
The Art of Drawing in France 1400-1900
The Art of Drawing in France presented 121 master drawings selected from the collection of Stockholm's Nationalmuseum, which is among the greatest repositories of graphic arts in the world. Among the master artists whose works were featured in this exhibition were Leonardo da Vinci, Francesco Primaticcio, Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, Antoine Watteau, J.B.S. Chardin, Francois Boucher, Camille Corot, Jean-Francois Millet, Eugene Delacroix, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, and Paul Cezanne.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections 37
Andrius Balukas, Suzanne Bocanegra, Jan Cunningham, Carter Hodgkin, Hideki Matsumoto, Susan Moore, Ed Robbins, Sara B. Waterbury
Selections 36
Craig Buckbee, Kwang Yeop Cheon, Kate Delos, Trudi Hirsch, Shelagh Keely, Janis Krasnow, Margery Mellman, Tina Miriam
Selections 35
Joe Andoe, Robert Bordo, Leslie DeFrancesco, Jamie Fuller, Elinore Holinshead, Julie Langsam, Richard Lodwig, Lisi Misera, Kerri Scharlin, Catherin Tirr
Selections 34
Celeste Boehm, Virginia Buchan, Chris Daubert, Salvatore Federico, Elizabeth Gourlay, Gilbert Hsiao, Dennis Kane, Richmond Lewis, Vytas Sakalas, Amy Sillman, Thomas Weaver, and Barbara Yoshida
Sol LeWitt
Wall Drawings
The Northern Landscape
Flemish, Dutch, and British Drawings from the Courtauld Collections
The Northern Landscape was the first U.S. presentation of 120 works selected from the extensive collections of the Courtauld Institute, London. The exhibition included drawings by sixty-six artists dating from the early sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The exhibition captured a brilliantly varied graphic panorama of the Northern European view of nature inspired by the local landscapes of the lowlands and England as well as artists' travel abroad, particularly to Italy. Included in the exhibition were drawings by Bruegel, van Heemskerk, de Momper, Bloemaert, van Goyen, Lievens, Koninck, and Turner.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections 33
Jan Arabas, Steven Baris, Steve Derrickson, Rebecca Doughty, Cathrin Hoskinson, Daniel Josephs, Dave King, Peter Leyh, Linda Lynch, Stephen Maine, Peter Schroth, Tim Stocco, Blake Summers
Selections 32
Ron Anteroinen, Susan Barnes, Mary Barry, Barbara Buckman, Don Fearey Angela Genilcore, Vanessa Jackson, Rusty Kane, You Ming Lam, Gary Nichols, Janet Snell
Selections 31
Jim Chiros, Adam Cox, Barry Feuerstein, Marcia Godosky, Ian Hughes, Ann Ledy, David Lowe, Peter Mollenkof, Mekki Schmidt, Gwen Strahle
Selections 30
Joan Albert, Taka Amano, Richard Dunn, Xing Fei, David Jackson, Claire Lieberman, Ann Litke, Norma Markley, Janet Stafford, David Wynne
Drawing from Venice
Masterworks from the Museo Correr
Drawing from Venice: Masterworks from the Museo Correr presented 128 works selected from the magnificent collection of the municipal museum of Venice. The selection of work in the exhibition spanned the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries and featured drawings by seventy-three painters, sculptors, and architects.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections 29
Paloma Cerunda, Gary Dodson, Paul Joffe, Win Knowlton, Paul Laster, Evan Polenghi, Matthew Radford, Cari Rosmarin, Robery Selwyn, Julie Trager
Selections 28
Brian Bomeisler, G. Roger Denson, Lesley Dill, Alberta Grieve, Barry Gray, Bryn Jayes, Alexis Rockman, Elaine L. Smollin, Gerald Wagoner, Andrea Way
Selections 27
Ivy Dachman, Michael Evert, Joyce Fillip, Donna H. Gans, Alyson Garvey, Douglas Geiger, Mark R. Smith, Ken Sofer, Stephen Talasknik
Selections 26
Roger Brouard, Peter Burgess, David Dawson, Jan Van Den Debblesteen, James Elaine, Barbara Friedman, Kwok Mang Ho, Charles Luce, Linus Meldrum, Andrew Moszynski, Dean Nimmer, Keith Ragone, Sabine Reckwell, Julie Shapiro, Joel Sokolov,
Reading Drawings
A Selection From The Victoria & Albert Museum
121 Masterpieces of drawings by artists as diverse as: George Braques, Canaletto, Thomas Chippendale, Albrecht Durer, Thomas Gainsborough, David Hockney, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, Natalia Gontcharova, Gustave Klimt, fernand Leger, Sol LeWitt, Andrew Mantegna, Peter-Paul Rubens, Sir John Soane, Jacopo Tintoretto, J.M.W.Turner, Andrea Del Verrocchio
Selections 25
Steven Layton Buckley, Randall Dahlgren, Timothy Daly, Wayne Enstice, Walter Gurbo, Michael Morris, Jill Moser, Paul Smith, Levent Tuncer, William Wilkins
Selections 24
Michael Connelly, Eric Holzman, Paul Hunter, Carl Lehmann-Haup, Patricia McCoy, Kim McLean, Nedra Newby, Debora Gilbert Ryan, Erik Sandgren, Joan Weber
Selections 23
Daisy Craddock, Joseph Goodwin, Renee Green, Heather Holden, Jennifer Krauss, Donald Powley, Scott Sherk, Rodrigo Shopis
Selections 22
Robert Boyce, Robert Carvin, Jessica Diamond, Ming Fay, Mireille Gros, Michael Kessler, Roman Kujawa, Lillian Mulero, Mark Rogers, Richard Vance
Great Drawings From the Collection of The Royal Institute of British Architecture
The exhibition presented eighty-two masterpieces of English, French, Italian, American, and Indian architectural drawing from the collection of The Royal Institute of British Architecture, London. Works in the exhibition dated from the late fifteenth century to the present drawings of buildings actually realized, as well as conceptual studies, fantasies, and other unexecuted designs in a dazzling variety of media and techniques.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections 21
Nevin Berger, Juan Boza, Elena Coon, Domenic Cretara, Davis Fitzgerald, Davis Humphrey, Joel Janowitz, Stephen Lack, Michael McKeown, Minnie Maude May Schuyler, Thomas Slaughter, Linda Warren
Seagram: Interiors
Ansel Adams, Richard Artschwager, William Clift, Robert Frank, Paul Grotz, Kirsti Jean Hager, Arnold Kramer, Jeol Janowitz Clarence John Laughlin, Robin Lehrer, Helen Levitt, Joel Meyerowitz, Jim Richard, Wayne Sorce, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Bob Thall, George Tice, Geoff Winningham
Selections 20
Stephen Alijan, Elisa Amoroso, Barbara Anello, John Ferro, Marianne Nowack, Brandt Junceau, Michael Markham, Birke McGilly, Peter Schuyf, Joanne Storch
Selections 19
William Blimenfeld, Stefany Blyn, Calvin Brown, Frank Fristachi, Jeff Gompertz, Peter Halley, Michael Kellers, Iona Kleinhaut, Nancy Lifschutz, George Perez Orta, Michael Roman, Mary Anges, Smith, Joanne Stryker
Selections 18
Ruth Bauer, Kristi Hager, Jamillah Jennings, Scott Kilgour, Hilda O'Connell, James Randall, Aura Rosenberg, Linda Salemo, Joseph Schactman, Fred Schuback, Bart Thrall, Bruch Wall
Selections 17
Peter Drake, Marilyn Holsing, Michael Katz, John Knecht, Donato Mancini, Kevin McGrath, Sandra Moore, Howard Nathenson, Michael Newhard, Michele Owings, David Reeb, Chrissanne Stathacos
New Drawings in America
(5th Anniversary Show)
New Drawings in America presented new work by 174 artists who participated in group exhibitions at The Drawing Center since its opening in 1977.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections 16
Eric Chan, Nancy Chunn, Jerry Gorovoy, Grace Graupe-Pillard, Claudia McNulty, Steve Miller, Chip Nichols, John Osborne, Cliff Petterson, Gary Riester, Ross Rosenberg, Elke Solomon, and Susan Chrysler-White
Selections 15
John Billiangham, Thomas Corey, Nina Ferrari, Randy Freeman, Mark Innerst, Peter Julian, Joseph Nechvatal, Percy Scott, Jolie Stahl, David Winter
Selections 14
Baldo Diodato, John Germain, Marc Lida, Lawrence, Ron Meisner, Nachume Miller, Mancy Ring, Michale Ross, Michael Vessa, Julie Wachtel, Mary Warner, Sandra Winters, Thomas Woodruff
Seagram: Dreams and Fantasies
Peggy Bacon, Oscar Bluemner, Loiuse Bourgeois, John Williams Carnell, Jean Debuffet, Max Ernst, Jimmy Ernst, Louis Fauere, Mario Giacmelli, Ralph Gibson, David Hockney, Clarence John Laughlin, Vassily Y. Stinikov, Man Ray, Andre Masson, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Ad Reinhardt, Kay Sage, Alan Saret, Jeffrey Silverthorne, Frederick Sommer, Pavel Tchelitchew, Jerry Uelsmann
Sculptors' Drawings Over Six Centuries
Sculptors' Drawings Over Six Centuries, 1400-1950 offered a unique look into the creative process of sculptors, including such masters as Bernini, Canova, Rodin, Eakins, and Brancusi. Curated by Colin Eisler, the exhibition featured previously unexhibited drawings focusing on the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.
Buy the catalogue.
Selections 13
John Bennett, Gerry Griffin, Suzanne Joelson, William Kosmoski, Colin Loy Lee, Emmanuel Pereire, Charles Perkalis, Donna Salvo, Beth Shadur, Richard Schwarzwald, Francisca Sutil
Artists' Postcards: Holiday Series
Carol Anthony, Fanny Brennan, Russell Drisch, Robert Kulicke, Carol Wald, Lella Vignelli, Massimo Vignelli
Selections 12
Armand Conine, William Garbe, Linda Gottesfeld, Judith Hudson, Dennis Kardon, Jane Kusmierski, Tony Mascatello, Gerry Morehead, Ivan Schwartz, Andy Sichel, Mark Tansey
Selections 11
Donald Baechler, Richard Bosman, John Digby, Dane Goodman, Thomas Lo Cicero, Leonard Mainor, Richard McKown, Mary Ann Michna, Jim Richard, Dana Salisbury, and Tad Wiley
Seagram: Self-Portraits
Chuck Close, Imogen Cunningham, Jim Dine, Lee Friedlander, Ralph Gibson, David Hockney, Michael Jurson, Alex Katz, Andre Kertesz, Joan Lyons, Claes Oldenburg, Man Ray, Robert Rauschenberg, Lucas Samaras, Edward Steichen, Jacques Villon
Selections 10
Katie Degroot, James Gingerich, John McDevitt King, Frank Moore, Ellen Phelan, Wlarter Koenigstein, Rick Maslow, Frank Moore, Maryam Zafar, James Zwaldo
62 x 12
John Fekner, Frank Galuszka, Richard Jarden, Dennis Leder, John Masino, Helen Oji, Laura Russell, Denise Shavers, Steven Siegel, Virginia Snygg, Peter Wise, Paul Zelevansky
Third Anniversary Exhibition
Eve Eisenstadt, Julia Healy, Sherri Hollaender, Wonsook Kim, Sidney Mcelhenney, George Moore, Michael Mostoller, Stephen Pentak, Katia Ramsey, Philip Rand-Smith, Roger Sheperd, Philip Warner
Seagram: Nature Arranged: Modern Still Lifes
Richard Artschwager, Eugene Arget, Peter Blume, Charles Burchfield, Harry Callahan, John William Carnell, Stuart Davis, Jan Dibbets, Jim Dine, Arnold Kramer, Man Ray, Robert Loius Frank, Ellsworth Kelly, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Richard Misrach, Georgia O'Keefe, James Rosenquist, Charles Sheeler, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, Jaques Villon, Minor White
Musical Manuscripts
Nancy Dwyer, Ellen Evjen, James Ford, Carl Goldhagen, Kirsten Hawthorne, Kevin Larmon, Julian Lethbridge, Barbara Novak, Tim Seggerman, Charels Seplowin
Previously Unseen
Andrew Glass, Anne Heimann, Jak Katalan, Karen Loftus, Lauriston Marshall, Mary Jane Mazuchowski, Grover Mouton, Lance Rutledge, Lydia Viscardi, Alan Young
Visionary Drawings
Architecture and Planning
Visionary Drawings featured works by Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Paolo Soleri, and other architects.
Show of Work by 11 Artists
James Biederman, Robert Coates, Guy-Dorian Cristol, Gary Falk, William Gwin, Anthony Janetti, Jane Kaplowitz, Robert Kitchen, Thomas Lawson, Jorge Madrinan, and Kurt Ossenfort
Group Exhibition of New Talent
Paul Caranicas, Timothy Conway, Carroll Dunham, Roger Ferri, Micahel Falcone, Milo Reice, David Row, Ann Turnley
Travel Sketches of Louis I. Kahn
Drawings for Animated Films 1914-1978
A retrospective of the development of the animated film in America. Included will be early works by Winsor McKay, Otto Messmer, and the Fleischer Studio; drawings from the MGM, Warner Bros., Walter Lantz, and Disney Studios; as well as drawings by a host of independent young animators. Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Woody Woodpecker, and scenes from "Fantasia" will be represented among the 120 drawings. The exhibition will be accompanied by film showings and workshops. Works in the exhibit include: Robert Breer, John Canemaker, Bob Clampett, Sally Cruikshank, Tissa David, Disney Studios, Victor Faccinto, Oskar Fishinger, Fleischer Studios, George Griffin, Hubley Studios, Winsor McCay, Otto Messmer.
Seagram: Animals: Drawings and Photographs
Eugene Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Salvador Dali, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jaques H. Latrique, Eadweard Muybridge, Alfred Stieglitz, Louis Valtat, Gary Winogrand
Roland Ayers, Len Bellinger, Mario Botas, Gary Brown, Juris Cimbulis, Barbara Garber, Robin Lehrer, David Sharpe, Herbert Wentscher, Alan Wexler
First Anniversary
Jonathan Andrews, Darah Canright, Sue Frecon, Jane Greer, Charlotte Hart, James Levins, Alan McCord, Paul Neagu, Gerald Pryor, Winston Roeth
Artists' Postcards
John Ashbery, Victoria Barr, Donald Bartheleme, Richard Benson, Joe Brainard, John Cage, William Copley, Jim Dine, Russel Drisch, Donal Evans, Gonzalo Fonseca, Mary Frank, Edward Gorey, Michael Graves, Marilynn Hamann, Christopher Hewat, Claus Hoie, Wolf Kahn, Lee Krasner, Robert M. Kulicke, Michael Langensein, Paul Linfante, Hitch Lyman, Maureen McCabe, Andrew MacNair, John Morning, Robert Morris, Robert Motherwell, Robert Reid, James Rossant, Janel Stayton, Saul Stenberg, Helda Sterne, James Stevenson, Lenore Tawney, Larry Williams, Helen Miranda Wilson, Robert Wilson, Donald Windham
Sol LeWitt
Drawings For A More Modern Architecture
Richard B. Oliver, Gerald Allen, Stuart Cohen, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Allen Greenberg, Michell Giurgola, John Hejduk, Coy Howard, Freank Israel, R.M. Kliment, Rudolfo Machado, Charles Moore, Lauretta Vinciarelli, Hardy/Holzman/Pfeiffer, William Tumbull, Robert A.M. Stern, Stanley Tigerman, Venturi & Rauch, George Ranalli, Jorge Silvetti
Summer 77
Carol Ashley, Gerald Incandela, Mel Kendrick, Christopher Knowles, Don Leicht, Olli Lyytikainen, George Neroponte, Judith Van Amringe, Terry Winters
The Drawings of Antonio Gaudi
The Drawings of Antonio Gaudi was a major retrospective of the Catalan architect whose unique buildings have attracted millions to Barcelona. This exhibition was the first time Gaudí's drawings had been shown outside of Spain and was the largest exhibition of this material ever mounted.
Buy the catalogue.