Ruth Asawa @ Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC + Menil Drawing Institute, Houston - Ruth Asawa Through Line

Ruth Asawa Through Line

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

September 16, 2023 - January 15, 2024

Ruth Asawa Through Line is the first exhibition to examine Ruth Asawa’s oeuvre through the lens of her lifelong drawing practice. Co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Menil Collection, this presentation reveals the complexity and richness of the materials and processes she experimented with, emphasizing the foundational role that drawing played in developing her distinct visual language. While now widely recognized as a sculptor, Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) practiced drawing daily, referring to the act as her “greatest pleasure and the most difficult.” Through drawing, Ruth Asawa explored the world around her and the boundaries of the medium itself, turning everyday encounters into moments of profound beauty and endowing ordinary objects with new aesthetic possibilities.

Positioning drawings, collages, and watercolors alongside stamped prints, copper foil works, and sketchbooks, the exhibition exposes the breadth of Ruth Asawa’s innovative practice through over one hundred works from public and private collections, many of which have not been previously exhibited. Organized thematically, the presentation begins with foundational lessons the artist absorbed and built upon at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s. Subsequent galleries examine the function of repetition and the development of specific motifs and approaches—from the Greek meander to the paper fold—and how they recur throughout her work. The exhibition shows how drawing emerged as a cornerstone of Ruth Asawa’s practice in San Francisco, later becoming a key component of her role as an educator and community leader in the Bay Area. Surveying the artist’s impressive range and expansive approach, Ruth Asawa Through Line offers an unparalleled window into Ruth Asawa’s exploratory and resourceful approach to materials, line, surface, and space.

This exhibition is co-organized by Kim Conaty, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Edouard Kopp, John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Chief Curator of the Menil Drawing Institute, with Scout Hutchinson, Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum, and Kirsten Marples, Curatorial Associate at the Menil Drawing Institute. 

After the exhibition closes at the Whitney, it will travel to the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston.

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY 10014

whitney.org

Draw Like a Machine: Pop Art, 1952-1975 @ The Menil Collection, Houston

Draw Like a Machine: Pop Art, 1952-1975

The Menil Collection, Houston 

October 29, 2021 - March 13, 2022

Roy Lichtenstein 

Steak, 1963 

Graphite and crayon on paper 

16 1/8 × 24 1/2 in. (40.9 × 62.2 cm).

The Menil Collection, Houston 

Purchased with funds provided by an anonymous donor

© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Photo: Paul Hester

The Menil Collection presents Draw Like a Machine: Pop Art, 1952–1975. The exhibition features over thirty drawings that upend the traditionally assumed connection that drawing has to the hand of the artist. Featuring works primarily sourced from the Menil’s permanent collection, along with select loans from local Houston collections, Draw Like a Machine is on view at the Menil Drawing Institute.

The exhibition focuses on drawings made during a time when gestural and expressionistic mark-making was considered increasingly outmoded, and artists were actively experimenting with images and processes borrowed from advertising and mass media. The resulting artworks bridge the seeming contradiction between the manual and the mechanical.

Highlights of the exhibition include Andy Warhol’s series of six drawings of Gene Swenson completed in 1962, the year before Swenson’s iconic ARTnews interview with Warhol, which centered on the broad inquiry, “What is Pop Art?” In response to the question, Andy Warhol declared his intention to “be a machine” and “machine-like” in his art practice, a quote that inspired the current exhibition’s title. Warhol sought to create works that intentionally resembled printed reproductions using a blotted line technique that combined drawing and printmaking strategies. The exhibition also includes a number of Andy Warhol’s drawings from the 1950s, highlighting a range of techniques he employed.

Rebecca Rabinow, director of the Menil Collection, said: “Draw Like a Machine highlights a strength of the museum’s collection, including more than a dozen important drawings originally collected by John and Dominique de Menil. We are grateful to a handful of enthusiastic local collectors who have allowed us to borrow their works to add to this focused presentation.”

Draw Like a Machine spotlights a generation of artists in the United States who bridged fine art and industrial design, including Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Idelle Weber. Certain works in the exhibition foreground the alluring visual advertising strategies developed by leading marketing firms to direct and encourage consumer spending in the postwar era, with strong examples by Tom Wesselmann and Marjorie Strider. In California, artists such as Ed Kienholz blurred the lines of art and commerce even further.

Kelly Montana, Assistant Curator, Menil Drawing Institute, said: “Informed by an era in which art was increasingly integrated into popular culture, artists exploited graphic strategies harnessed by the working creatives of the day such as admen, illustrators, and sign painters to critique and subvert the prestige of drawing.”

Draw Like a Machine: Pop Art, 1952-1975 is curated by Kelly Montana, Assistant Curator, Menil Drawing Institute.

THE MENIL COLLECTION, HOUSTON

Menil Drawing Institute

1533 Sul Ross Street, Houston, Texas 77006

www.menil.org