Experimental Drawing Workshop
Sun, Sept 17, 2023
1 pm, 3 pm
Ruth Asawa, Untitled (MI.153, Seven Thonet-Style Bentwood Chairs), c. 1950s. Felt-tipped pen on paper, 42 × 60 in. (106.7 × 152.4 cm). Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. Artwork © 2023 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner. Photograph by Stephen Arnold
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Floor 3, Theater
Explore the crucial role materials and process played in Ruth Asawa’s evocative visual language in this hands-on drawing workshop, inspired by Ruth Asawa Through Line. Develop line, shape, tone, and color and consider how observation and experimentation guide artmaking as we explore the relationship between two and three dimensions.
For Asawa, drawing was more than an act of mark-making or of working on the blank page. Akin to her well-known sculptures, drawing was a process of spatial orientation that crossed mediums. During her rigorous coursework at Black Mountain College under the tutelage of Josef Albers, Asawa learned, as she would later put it, to find the balance between figure and ground so that “one thing didn’t dominate the other” and “the background became the figure and the figure became the background.” It was not so much a matter of learning how to draw as it was of learning how to see.
Materials will be provided, no experience necessary.
