Drawings Prints Modern-Contemporary

Session: Drawings and Prints II (Modern to Contemporary)

Chair: Dr. Edouard Kopp, John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Chief Curator, Menil Drawing Institute

Panelists:

Laura K. Minton

Curator of Exhibitions, The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia

Lminton@virginia.edu

Flowers, Mountains, Skies, and Eyeballs: Louise Bourgeois Illustrates Homely Girl, A Life

Louise Bourgeois’s Homely Girl, A Life (1991–1992) exists in several different components: a portfolio of ten drypoints and two volumes with different accompanying imagery and special editions of each version. For this collaborative publication, Bourgeois produced images for Arthur Miller’s short story Homely Girl, A Life. Set in 1930s New York City, Miller tells the tale of Janice, an unhappily married woman who weathers devastating personal traumas before falling in love with a man who is blind.

Bourgeois came up with two different concepts to complement Miller’s story. The first idea consisted of small ballpoint pen drawings on envelopes of flowers, mountains, and skies. The drawings were translated into drypoints for the print portfolio and special edition book as well as reproduced in the trade volume. For her second concept, she obtained 35mm slides of diseased eyes and made collages. The photos were tipped into the publication at various points in the story. The text is printed in gray, with any mention of sight, eyes, or the act of looking printed in red. This paper will explore Bourgeois’s images in conjunction with Miller’s text as well as the preparatory materials developed during the making of the full project.

Joshua Pazda

Director, Josh Pazda Hiram Butler

Josh@pazdabutler.com

Tony Feher as Draftsman

Tony Feher (1956–2016) was an American artist best known for his sculptures made of ubiquitous, everyday objects such as plastic bottles, glass jars, marbles, twine, cardboard boxes, and other mass-produced items. While Feher is widely known as a sculptor, it is less known that he was also a prolific draftsman who assembled an archive of nearly one thousand drawings throughout his career. Feher’s drawings reflect the modest and quotidian nature of his sculptures. He did not utilize deluxe or handmade papers, instead favoring stuff “at hand,” such as napkins, discarded correspondence, restaurant menus…etc. Given his chosen supports, Feher’s drawings wed the personal, political, and cultural realities of his experience with his creative project as a whole. His drawings depict an array of images and text, including representations of the objects that he included in his sculptures and installations, schematic drawings for the layout of exhibitions, text-based drawings, among others. In addition to exploring the so far completely unknown element of autographic drawing in his oeuvre, this paper will look at Feher’s sculpture through the lens of drawing, particularly to the many ways that he engaged the line of material objects as a method of drawing in space.

Michelle Donnelly

PhD Candidate, History of Art, Yale University

Michelle.donnelly@yale.edu

Mutual Dependency: The Studio Context of David Hammons’s Body Prints

From 1968 to 1977, David Hammons lubricated his skin with butter, margarine, and baby oil and pressed himself onto paper in his studio. His strategic choreography did not occur at a printmaking workshop but in the former space of the West Slauson Ballroom. With twenty-foot-high ceilings and 3,000 square feet of wooden floors, his studio was not merely a backdrop but a stage for his performative printmaking. Although scholars have typically treated the studio as a tabula rasa, I contend that Hammons’s site of production is integral to the meaning of his embodied works on paper.

This project investigates Hammons’s body prints in the sociohistorical context of his Slauson Avenue studio: a dancehall where Black social clubs congregated in the 1920s–50s and a shared space of artmaking in the 1970s. Drawing upon performance and kinship theory, I argue that Hammons’s embodied practice forged relations of Black intimacy. With particular attention to works created in collaboration with others, I consider how reciprocal processes of touch both activated and reconfigured the site’s embedded histories of Black belonging. At once tender and pained, Hammons’s prints enacted the mutual dependency of Black bodies in the face of segregation and exclusion in Los Angeles.