The Drawing Center

Self Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg with “Navigator (1962)", ca.1962. Copyright: Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

The Drawing Center is honored to be one of nine recipients of The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s first Artistic Innovation and Collaboration (AIC) grant, which will support the commission of a new collaborative performance series. The new works by Susan Hefuna and Luca Veggetti; Rashaad Newsome; and Suzanne Lacy and Andrea Bowers will be presented during The Drawing Center’s first year of exhibitions following a major building expansion.

The Drawing Center’s Executive Director, Brett Littman, remarked, “We salute the vision that the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has for this new important funding initiative. This grant is a huge validation for our new programmatic ideas that we plan to explore post completion of our expansion project in 2012.  These are the kind of experimental and forward thinking exhibitions and events that will keep The Drawing Center’s mission relevant well into the 21st Century.”

Christy MacLear, Executive Director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, commented,“We are delighted to support three of Drawing Center’s opening programs, which are collaborative and innovative at their core. What interested us particularly was the creative exploration into uncharted territory of what “drawing” is – less as a defined practice and more of a true process of discovery. Drawing, through these programs becomes a fearless exploration of new ideas in art – and that is what Robert Rauschenberg Foundation would love to support.”

www.rauschenbergfoundation.org

Trisha Brown, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, Dec. 9, 2011 – Jan. 25, 2012

Drawings by pioneer postmodern dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown are the main feature of her second solo show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in Chelsea. Part of a longtime engagement with mark-marking adjunct to her dance practice, selections from Brown’s series “It’s a Draw” document the movements of her feet as she dances on paper.[i] Like her Judson Church colleague Yvonne Rainer’s recent book of poems,[ii] Brown’s drawings address a contemporary audience accustomed to intergenre code-switching. Yet critiques of dilettantism may be quick on the heels of the de-specialized, often impetuous forays into new disciplines endemic in today’s creative community. As Claire Bishop argues in a recent essay, an artist’s decision to reject the specific modes of production of his/her training for others, or de-skilling, “always requires a re-skilling if it is to convince us that it is more than simply amateur. On the most basic level, this re-skilling is rhetorical: being able to account for, persuasively narrate, and even theorize one’s disciplinary unraveling.”[iii] How effectively can Brown’s drawings hold their own as integrated formal compositions in a visual art context? Is their significance rather derivative of the ephemeral performances they index? Are Brown’s maneuvers between media limber enough for her drawings to withstand critique as objects?

Lining the walls of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. are 11 large drawings, each approximately 130 by 107 inches. As she moves atop paper flush with the floor, an oil pastel or piece of charcoal poised between Brown’s toes inscribes her perambulations. Emerging as languid arcs, tight whorls, isolated toe-touch daubs, heel scuffs, and occasional foot and fingerprints, incidental strokes map Brown’s contact with the ground, the moments between steps or leaps. A spectrum of rhythmic and tonal details can be teased out through reading the traces of her motions—light, sprawling and sparse; dense and angular—a vigorous shift even ripping the paper substrate in one case.

Trisha Brown, Untitled (Montpellier), 2002. Charcoal on paper, 130 x 106.75 inches. © Trisha Brown; Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Such a detail underscores Brown’s attention to positioning along vertical and horizontal axes—scuff marks become gestural as the drawings are transported from floor to wall, reorienting the viewer’s relationship to the performance, just as Brown’s infamous 1970 piece Man Walking Down the Side of a Building accomplished the exact inverse for dance. A subtle counterpart is Brown’s 1998 video Shot Backstage, exhibited alongside  the drawings, in which the choreographer videotaped her company’s performance from a lateral vantage between the stage curtains, perpendicular to the audience’s perspective.

In a series of short reflections which annotate cropped “It’s a Draw” works in Walker Art Center’s 2008 exhibition catalogue, Brown verbally reconstructs her movements from their visual vestiges. Of a particularly dark helical form she comments: “It felt like tar on my foot, and turning, and trying to create white striations also.”[iv] One questions whether these notes are a retrospective analysis of the traces, or expose a precedent formal intention—did Brown’s visual discretion bear upon her dancing as the drawings emerged or were they composed objectively from a continuous performance?  Were her movements circumscribed by the paper’s dimensions, or did she allow transgressions of its boundaries?  It is perhaps this very probing of motives—which comes first, the drawing or the dance?—that gives the work a generative discursive strength. In Brown’s drawings the two contexts are so precisely overlaid, the methodologies so confounded, that these ambiguities will remain active and suspended, making their viewing an engaging aesthetic and intellectual experience. Instead of grasping for a new context altogether, Brown’s drawings reapply and challenge her primary practice in a new medium, their very process sketching the frictions of the transfer. -Kaegan Sparks, Special Events Associate

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^[i] Work from “It’s a Draw” is also pivotal to curator Helen Molesworth’s current exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Dance/Draw.

^[ii] Rainer, Yvonne. Poems. New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2011.

^[iii] Bishop, Claire. “UNHAPPY DAYS IN THE ART WORLD? De-skilling Theater, Re-skilling Performance.” The Brooklyn Rail December 2011/January 2012: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/12/art/unhappy-days-in-the-art-worldde-skilling-theater-re-skilling-performance

^[iv] Bither, Philip, Trisha Brown, and Peter Eleey. Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2008.

Will Cotton, Candy Cane Tree, 2006, 22 X 15 inches, ink and gouache on paper, courtesy of the artist and Mary Boone Gallery.

There are two ways to support The Drawing Center this holiday season with a tax-deductible contribution to either our Annual Fund or our Capital Campaign. Your gift to the Annual Fund helps sustain our exhibitions, publications, services for emerging artists, and educational programs. By giving to the Capital Campaign, you will contribute to a special fund used to support ReDraw: The Capital Plan for 35 Wooster Street, a major expansion of our permanent facility in SoHo.

During this exciting phase in institution’s history your support is more crucial now than ever. We hope you will consider The Drawing Center in your year-end giving. To make a secure donation to the Annual Fund online please click here. To make a contribution to the Capital Campaign, please call the Development office at (212) 219-2166 extension 219 or email crogati@drawingcenter.org.

Donate a total of $100 or more and receive a customized flash drive preloaded with five of The Drawing Center’s most highly acclaimed Drawing Papers publications.

Ludwig Bemelmans, De l'Audace, date unknown. Watercolor, gouache, brush and ink and wash with pastel on Marble Arch board, 30 x 21 1/2 inches

The exuberant title of the current show at Alex Zachary–Happy Holidays! Drawings!–is an immediate giveaway as to the spirit of the exhibition; it is structured less by any particular theme than by a jovial desire to present a group of intriguing, surprising, lovely images on paper. From Calder to Kilimnik, from Picabia to Richard Tuttle to Paul Thek, the show presents a wildly carousing–not to say chaotic and resolutely ahistorical–vision of some drawings of the last hundred years. Organized without attention to date or style, the show asks instead that each work be viewed one at a time, on its own terms, like the unwrapping of so many small but much-loved gifts.

The gallery itself is decked out with seasonal cheer: the walls are painted in black and white polka dots, some of the drawings sport ribbons on their frames, and a giant Christmas tree rises from the ground floor to the upper level of the two-story space. Such a fun-loving show could have come off as an almost shallow gesture, but at Alex Zachary it is organized with such panache that the invitation to simply enjoy looking, to move from one small frame to the next, feels both generous and substantive. Indeed, it is completely in the holiday spirit.

In the gallery’s entrance room, one finds Violetta Raditz’s crayon and pencil drawings of the early 1920s, featuring sumptuously colored, costumed figures, depicted in an ornate yet childlike hand. These ethereal characters partner with the watery Turbaned Figure, Tangier (c. 1976) by Duncan Grant, as well as the aforementioned Karen Kilimnik drawing Persian Room at New York’s Plaza (1996), a sketchy image of Barbra Streisand in an opulent fur hat (“When she goes, she goes all the way,” reads the accompanying text.) Downstairs, a selection of Pavel Tchelitchew’s costume designs for dancers describe each figure in angular and swooping lines.

Karen Klimnik, Persian Room at New York's Plaza, 1996. China Marker on paper, 40 x 26 inches.

Continuing the small-scale drama of the body, downstairs the viewer encounters Alexander Calder’s confrontation between a nude woman and a rearing horse (date unknown); Milton Avery’s whirling circus scene The Human Merry-Go-Round (c. 1932); and a work by Tom of Finland depicting a nude with his back to us, another man seeming to gaze intently at what the viewer cannot see (Untitled, preliminary drawing, 1980).

Considered here as circumscribed worlds unto themselves, the drawings project a particular kind of mysterious delight, and this show happily trades the usual preciousness attendant with works on paper for a jubilant celebration of each image in its own right. Indeed, a watercolor by Ludwig Bemelmans, depicting a voluptuous chorus girl offering herself to the crowd with awkward charm, is inscribed with what could be the modus operandi of the exhibition as a whole: “De l’Audace, De l’Audace, et encore de l’Audace [Audacity, Audacity and more Audacity]”! -Nova Benway, Curatorial Assistant

Construction continues on the expansion of our home in SoHo!

Below are the latest photographs marking ReDraw’s exciting progress. The demolition phase has opened up the Main Gallery to expose the framework of the space – brick walls, ceiling joist and all.

Stay tuned for continued updates as the building at 35 Wooster is transformed!

Main Gallery

Main Gallery, ceiling

Lower Level

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), Study for The Death of Sardanapalus, Pen and brown ink, brown wash. Musée du Louvre Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY. Photography: Franck Raux

Throughout the late eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth century, France underwent significant political, social, and cultural upheaval. The royal court was overthrown and the country suffered decades of regime change. Amid this turbulent climate, an incredibly productive artistic period was also underway. Embodying this bastion of creativity is a selection of eighty rarely seen works on paper from Paris’s Musée du Louvre, on view at The Morgan Library through December 31. David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France: Drawings from the Louvre offers vivid proof that French art from the late eighteenth through nineteenth centuries, like the politics of the time, was rife with contradictions—at once wildly excessive and even-keeled. As the French Revolution deposed the ancienne régime, the academic tradition of Neo-Classicism replaced Rococo ornamentation, which in turn, became supplanted by the formally liberated Romantics. The Morgan’s historically narrow selection of drawings by some the most celebrated draftsmen associated with Neo-Classicism and Romanticism typifies this stylistic progression.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), Study for The Turkish Bath, ca. 1859. Pen and brown ink, graphite, on two joined sheets of paper Musée du Louvre Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY. Photo: Thierry Le Mage

The shaky rhythm of this era begins with artist Jacques-Louis David, who pioneered a radical antidote to Neo-Classicism by substituting scenes from ancient history with Rococo images of courtly life. David’s evolution is traced through scenes from history, a profile portrait of a fellow member of the Revolution, and a preparatory drawing of Napoleon crowning himself emperor. Artists who trained in David’s studio are also on view, their individual approaches (and shifting political alliances) suggested by sleek line drawings of the Trojan War, episodes from Roman history in chiaroscuro, meticulous portraits, and frenetic battle scenes. Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s sumptuously modeled nudes, whose eloquent forms were created by subtle shadings of light to dark, demonstrate the academic tradition at its finest. The advent of Romanticism is highlighted by Théodore Géricault’s scrupulous explorations of pastoral and urban landscapes. In opposition to Géricault’s fluidity is the Neo-Classical incisiveness, often laced with erotic overtones, that is best seen in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s refined graphite portraits, which relied on the controlling logic of the drawn line. This contrast is particularly evident in the two studies for the Grande Odalisque (c.1814) and a pair of studies for the fantastical, Turkish Bath (c. 1859-60) with its anatomical elongation and exaggeration.

The exhibition presents more work by Eugène Delacroix than any other artist, from his exotic (almost abstract) preparatory sketches for the epic painting, Death of Sardanapalus, to more sensitive portraits of people in Morocco, where he traveled as part of the French colonialist enterprise. The show closes with an intimate, rarely-seen drawing by Honoré Daumier of a young woman who appears lost in handiwork. The image reveals Daumier’s ease with drawing materials; variations in black chalk lines suggest different tones and textures, and the subject’s life-like appearance demonstrates Daumier’s hidden aptitude for naturalism, though he was best known as a satirical caricaturist.

Such societal and political upheaval brought about dramatic changes in artistic style, content, and patronage. A new vitality swept through France’s artistic community, and practitioners who are today considered among the most outstanding were moving in important new directions. David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France chronicles this remarkable period of artistic ferment and captures the spirit of revolution onto the page. –Joanna Kleinberg, Assistant Curator

Join On The Mark before December 6 to receive a special membership rate and attend a private holiday party for young patrons! 

This year’s third annual On The Mark holiday celebration, held on Tuesday, December 6, will be hosted by collector Jean-Edouard Van Praet, whose impressive collection includes works by such artists as Sol LeWitt, Kara Walker, Carl Andre, and Richard Artschwager

On The Mark, The Drawing Center’s young patrons group, provides art enthusiasts in their twenties to early forties with a platform for engaging with the ever-evolving medium of drawing. Members enjoy all of the benefits of a Contributor level membership plus exclusive privileges in the following categories: Art Collecting 101, Leadership Development, Special Events, Private Studio Visits, Cultural Partnerships, Suggested Reading and Recognition.

Join On The Mark before December 6 and receive a $75 annual membership.* To join, contact Candace Rogati at crogati@drawingcenter.org or 212.219.2166 x219.

*Normally $200 annually. Special rate excludes Benefit Auction tickets.

The Drawing Center is thrilled to announce the groundbreaking of ReDraw: The Capital Plan for 35 Wooster Street. The construction process to create 50% more contiguous programming space at the Center’s beloved home in SoHo begins now! As the medium of drawing continues to grow and evolve, the new galleries will house the latest technology and upgrades to offer the public a more profound, revelatory and thought-provoking experience with art. With state-of-the-art galleries, the exploration of drawing will be accommodated far into the twenty-first century.

Main Gallery

Please continue to check The Bottom Line for photos and progress updates throughout the construction process!

Patti Smith, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, 2002. Pencil, tape, and digital image on paper. 13 1/2 x 11 inches.©Patti Smith. Courtesy the Artist and Robert Miller Gallery. Photo ©Jeffrey Sturges

On the morning of September 11^th 2001, legendary musician, writer and artist Patti Smith awoke to the sound of a passenger plane overhead and clouds of smoke filling the sky over her lower Manhattan street. An hour before, she had waved her daughter off to school while casually noting the twin towers that dominated her vista. Now the towers were gone.  Smith vocalized her reaction in the 2002 poem Twin Death: “They are gone. What form of intelligence had committed this deed? What portrait could I paint?  What lines might I draw? From what human memory can I draw from? I can no longer picture them.”

The result of Smith’s efforts is the subject of Patti Smith: 9.11 Babelogue on view through December 3^rd at The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery at Hunter College. Timed to coincide with the 10^th anniversary of September 11th, the exhibition is the first to document Smith’s 9.11 series in its entirety and comprises some 27 silkscreened works on paper created by the artist between 2001 and 2002. The show is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue containing related poems by Smith and an essay by curator Michelle Yun.

According to Yun, Smith’s decision to develop her response as a series of silkscreens was made in deliberate homage to Andy Warhol, whose Death and Disaster series is the obvious precedent for the project. The connection is most explicit in South Tower Silver Double Image which is inscribed “to Andy” on the lower right, and which echoes the pop master’s silver Double Elvis (1963) in both form and title. Like Warhol, Smith took her source material from a news photo, specifically, from a single image of the skeletal remains of the South Tower, which she renders in various colors and iterations throughout the series. Hence, South Tower Silver Double Image, whose faded, doubled rendition of an already mediated icon exploits the emotional distance evident in Warhol’s photographic repetitions. In other works, however, Smith departs from Warhol by adding pencil lines and collage elements to the silkscreened surface.  Specifically, she adopts a practice that she developed in the late 60s alongside her then companion and longtime friend Robert Mapplethorpe, repeatedly tracing over the image of the tower with graphic notations culled from primarily spiritual texts. In The Kingdom of God is Within You, the phrase from Luke 17:21 dances over the tower’s contours like a floating mantra, while the drawing South Tower is comprised entirely of letters whose curving forms give the building its structure.

Patti Smith, South Tower Silver Double Image, 2001. Silkscreen on paper 41 3/4 x 29 3/4 inches. © Patti Smith. Courtesy the artist and Robert Miller Gallery

In the catalogue, Yun writes that “Smith’s calligraphic annotations and collage interventions return the repetitive images to the realm of humanity.” Certainly it is true that we can physically sense Smith’s presence as we trace the thrust of her pencil lines over the silkscreened motifs.  But this graphic element serves an additional purpose. It is through the union of language and image that Smith discovers how to convey what had originally seemed to her so utterly beyond the scope of representation. Significantly, Smith was drawn to the image of the fragmented South Tower because of its resemblance to Pieter Bruegel’s 1563 painting The Tower of Babel. Invoking the Biblical story, Smith observes in Twin Death: “Shall we mourn our inability as a people to communicate? We are still the children of Babel. Speaking in divided tongues, unable to comprehend one another.” If the twinned forms in South Tower Silver Double Image read as opaque, ghostly presences, Smith’s difficult-to-read notations are scarcely more legible. And yet, placed atop and alongside the photographic images, they convey a potent if unresolved desire for communication. Indeed, as we shift between image and text and, in the case of South Tower, attempt to locate a visual form out of the scattered phrases themselves, it is this irresolution that remains paramount. If Smith has not succeeded in picturing the tragedy of 9.11, she has found a way to give form to her struggle. -Claire Gilman, Curator

On Saturday, November 12 from 10:30am-12:00pm, The Drawing Center and Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York offer a free art-making workshop that engages children and adults in hands-on creative exploration. Educator-led discussions and art-making activities will encourage participants to get inspired, have fun, and make art together!

Children ages 8-12 and their parents are invited to explore the Carl Beam retrospective exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian. This workshop will encourage participants to discover the world of museums by creating their own drawings. New relationships and ways of seeing will be revealed as kids engage with the objects on view. Through hands-on experience, families will connect the work on display with the natural world outside.

FREE – no experience necessary!

Advance reservations are appreciated. For more information or to register, please call 212-219-2166 x205 or email agood@drawingcenter.org no later than the Friday prior to the workshop. We require that children be accompanied by an adult.