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February Issue
2010
Weatherspoon
Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, Features Works by Leonardo Drew
The
Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at
Greensboro is pleased to present the exhibition, Existed: Leonardo
Drew, on view from Feb. 6 through May 9, 2010. This
major mid-career survey exhibition examines the artist's ongoing
mediation of minimalism and African-American history through fourteen
major sculptures, eight works on paper, and a special on-site
installation in the Weatherspoon's atrium.
Throughout his career, Drew has been continuously engaged with the cyclical nature of existence. Made to resemble the detritus of everyday life, his formally abstract but emotionally charged compositions have an aesthetic authority and metaphorical weight that are unique, transcending time and place in a celebration of things eternal. These works range from the intense drama of his sculptures and installations of the 1980s, to the epic sweep of his massive wall-bound tableaux of the 1990s, to the ethereal language of his paper casts of the early 2000s.
Beginning in 2002, Drew
began to create sculptures using paper replicas of his ongoing
collection of castoff items that have constituted the material
source for his works. Presented on their own or in encasings of
the artist's making, they introduce a ghostlike immateriality
and a sense of meditation that counter the visceral weight and
physical immediacy of his earlier tableaux. The new on-site installation
of Number 123 in the Weatherspoon's atrium is composed
of numerous individual elements collected by Drew over the span
of his career and is considered one of his grandest and most ambitious
projects to date.
Leonardo Drew (b. 1961, Tallahassee, FL) attended the Parsons
School of Design and received a BFA from the Cooper Union in 1985.
His work has been shown internationally, including at the Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Royal Hibernian
Academy, Dublin; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Miami Art Museum;
Tate Modern, London; and the St. Louis Art Museum.
A monograph published in conjunction with the exhibition is the first publication to fully document and interpret Drew's career and his place within the broader context of contemporary art. At 208 pages, with more than 110-four color illustration plates, the publication includes essays by exhibition curator Claudia Schmuckli, Director, Blaffer Gallery, the Museum of the University of Houston and Allen S. Weiss, Associate Adjunct Professor, Performance Studies and Cinema, New York University; an interview with the artist; an annotated chronology; and a selected biography and bibliography. The catalogue retails for $59.95 and is available in the Weatherspoon Museum Store.
Existed: Leonardo Drew is organized by Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston. Major funding has been provided in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional support from the Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, the Linda Pace Foundation, The Fifth Floor Foundation, and Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Support for the exhibition at the Weatherspoon has been generously provided by the Weatherspoon Art Museum Association.
For further information
check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Museum at
336/334-5770 or visit (www.weatherspoon.uncg.edu).
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