This page from Drawing Papers 139 features Stoic Stack Guy, a gouache on
paper created by Jennifer Wynne Reeves in 2005.
The 2018 exhibition Jennifer Wynne Reeves: All Right for Now featured
the work of the late artist who 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. Reeves’ works on paper, Masonite, and wood, as
well as notebooks and text pieces (Reeves wrote copiously and had a large fan
base on Facebook), are a testament to the power of line and color to render
accessible deeply personal fears and desires.
The Drawing Papers are a series of publications
documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing
a forum for the study of drawing.
-Kara Nandin, Bookstore
Manager
A Page from the Drawing Papers Archive
This page from Drawing Papers 138 features The Treatment 8A, a pen ink and
pencil on paper drawing created by Toyin Ojih Odutola in 2015.
The 2018 group exhibition For Opacity: Elijah Burgher, Toyin
Ojih Odutola, and Nathaniel Mary Quinn brought together portrait drawings by
the three artists that explore diverse identities through each of their entirely
distinct stylistic approach and personal background. The three artists 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.
The Drawing Papers are a series of publications
documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing
a forum for the study of drawing.
-Kara Nandin, Bookstore
Manager
A Page from the Drawing Papers Archive
This page from Drawing Papers 136 features a detail of Bulwark #5, a
graphite, ink, metal leaf, metal tape, and color pencil drawing on Fabriano 4
paper made by Hipkiss in 2017.
The 2018 exhibition Hipkiss: Bulwark was the artists’ duo first
solo museum show in New York and presented 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. Praised
for their meticulously-detailed panoramic landscapes, the 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.
The Drawing Papers are a series of publications
documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing
a forum for the study of drawing.
-Kara Nandin, Bookstore
Manager
A Page from the Drawing Papers Archive
This page from Drawing Papers 135 features an untitled graphite on paper
drawing created by Terry Winters in 2007.
The 2018 exhibition Terry Winters Facts and Fictions (on-view
now at The University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass Amherst through April
28, 2019) presents an overview of Winters’ drawings from 1980 to the present that
represent the patterns and schema that undergird physical and intellectual
life. Winters’s drawings of grids, networks, and knots illustrate complex
encounters between biological drives, technological systems, and mental
processes. Featuring full cycles of drawings as well as a selection of
large-scale works on paper, the exhibition foregrounds 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.
The Drawing Papers are a series of publications
documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing
a forum for the study of drawing.
-Kara Nandin, Bookstore
Manager
A Page from the Drawing Papers Archive
This page from Drawing Papers 134 features an untitled oil paint, ink, and
graphite on paper drawing created by Eddie Martinez in 2016.
The 2017 exhibition Eddie Martinez: Studio Wall imitates the artist’s studio in which he
maintains a “drawing wall,” wherein sketches ranging in size, shape, and
material serve simultaneously as a source of inspiration and data bank for the
artist’s incessant imaginative output. The gallery walls were papered with
thousands of sketches along with several large drawings and paintings hung on
top of these sketches. 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.
The Drawing Papers are a series of publications
documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing
a forum for the study of drawing.
-Kara Nandin, Bookstore
Manager
A Page from the Drawing Papers Archive
This page from Drawing Papers 133 features Count Trump, an acrylic on paper
drawing created by Judith Bernstein in 2017.
The 2017 exhibition Judith Bernstein: Cabinet of Horrors
presented a new body of drawings
and paper murals made since Donald J. Trump was elected president in November
2016. Bernstein began engaging with social issues in her practice during the 1960s
creating anti-Vietnam drawings, monumental phalluses, and pieces consisting
entirely of her own signature. Bernstein’s newer work uses Trump’s own insult-driven,
childlike syntax and language to transform her anger, disgust, critique, and
disapproval of the current administration into powerful graphic and text-based
works.
The Drawing Papers are a series of publications
documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing
a forum for the study of drawing.
-Kara Nandin, Bookstore
Manager
A Page from the Drawing Papers Archive
This page from Drawing Papers 132 features
Blue and Orange Nudibranch, a watercolor on paper created by Else Bostelmann
in1931.
The 2017 exhibition Exploratory Works: Drawings from the
Department of Tropical Research Field Expeditions brought together
scientific renderings of deep sea creatures, Amazonian animals, and tropical
plant life created during field investigations led by legendary scientist
William Beebe. Taking the lab into the jungle, and notably hiring women as
scientists and illustrators, Beebe pioneered the methodology used to conduct
biological research and redefined notions of ecology and nature. With the help
of women artists observing and recording the creatures with attentive detail
and exquisite accuracy, Beebe and his team helped popularize science and garner
public interest in biology.
The Drawing Papers are a series of publications
documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing
a forum for the study of drawing.
-Kara Nandin, Bookstore
Manager
A Page from the Drawing Papers Archive
This page from Drawing Papers 131 features
Expectations Gatha, a marker on gridded notecard drawing created by Jackson Mac
Low in 1978.
The 2017 exhibition Jackson Mac Low: Lines–Letters–Words,
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. In
his Gathas series of drawings, one of which is seen here, Mac Low emphasizes
the visual and aural qualities of written languages, acting as both graphic
representations and performance scores.
The Drawing Papers are a series of publications
documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing
a forum for the study of drawing.
-Kara Nandin, Bookstore
Manager
A Page from the Drawing Papers Archive
This page from Drawing Papers 130 features
Cuentas [Necklace], an ink on paper drawing created by Mateo Lópezin 2016.
The 2017 exhibition Mateo López: Undo List was a multidisciplinary installation that featured
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. López contends that just as
everything manufactured was at one point a drawing, like a building or designed
object, so too, “an image is not flat; it is an atmosphere, it contains time
and space.” Some of the creative ways he uses to reveal drawing as such
includes trompe l’oeil paper renderings of two-dimensional objects (for
example, near-exact replicas of lined sheets of paper); drawings made out of
the leftovers produced by cutting into other works; and making
three-dimensional drawings of three-dimensional objects by folding paper into
sculptures. As seen here in his 2016 drawing “Cuentas,” López plays with
conceptions of space by using the two-dimensionality of drawing to depict a
three-dimensional necklace.
The Drawing Papers are a series of publications
documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing
a forum for the study of drawing.
-Kara Nandin, Bookstore
Manager
A Page from the Drawing Papers Archive
This page from Drawing Papers 129 features Untitled (An Image), a charcoal
and collage drawing on paper created by Olga Chernysheva in 2016.
The 2016 exhibition Olga Chernysheva: Vague Accent featured
a series of drawings that Chernysheva made during a month-long visit to New
York City. The scenes she depicts are ordinary but convey the collusion of interior
and public lives. Drawing subway stations, museums, and city streets,
Chernysheva’s attentive and observant works lay bare the impossibility of
separating inner and outer life. As seen here in an untitled drawing, a doorman
that has fallen asleep at his post is both on the clock and withdrawn into his
dreams.
The Drawing Papers are a series of publications
documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing
a forum for the study of drawing.
