DRAWING AS PRACTICE @ the National Academy of Design
Drawing as Practice is the inaugural exhibition at the National Academy of Design’s new location in the Chelsea arts district. Curated in response to the National Academy of Design’s significant collection of more than 8,000 works of American art and architecture, this group exhibition centers on drawing as both the medium and practice connecting the many divergent points of interest that have contributed to the founding and history of the National Academy.
Drawing as Practice is organized by Sara Reisman, Chief Curator and Director of National Academician Affairs, and Natalia Viera Salgado, Associate Curator, with research and scholarship by Diana Thompson, Director of Collections.
In this interview, Reisman discusses her professional background and her involvement in the massive undertaking of curating of Drawing as Practice.
(All photographs are of the Drawing as Practice exhibition, © Etienne Frossard. Courtesy of National Academy of Design).
Interview by Tyler Nesler
You have an extensive curatorial and grant-making background working with organizations such as the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, New York City’s Percent for Art program at the Department of Cultural Affairs, and many other museums and institutions. How did you come to your role as Chief Curator and Director of National Academician Affairs at the National Academy of Design? What most attracted you to working with the Academy?
In the spring of 2021, I learned about the National Academy of Design’s search for Chief Curator, which was a two-pronged position conceived to lead the curatorial program while working in the service of the National Academicians (the National Academy’s membership of elected artists and architects). I was most excited about the prospect of a long-standing institution with such a diverse community of stakeholders - artists and architects working across the spectrum of aesthetic and conceptual approaches. Coming out of the pandemic, the cultural sector had gone through an incredibly important social awakening, yet a lot of the sector’s political signaling had become routine and formulaic, in some cases institutionalized.
I was attracted to the idea of an artist-founded and led organization like the Academy as a space where individual voices could be amplified without institutional overdetermination. Beyond that, I thought an institution with an exhibitions and educational mandate alongside a vast collection of works contributed by the members could be the antidote to programmatic constraints that many museums had been grappling with.
As some readers will remember, the National Academy was founded in 1825 by 30 artists and architects when there were no museums or art schools as we know them today. More recently, the Academy sold the buildings where it had operated as a museum and a school on the Upper East Side. The new beginning of rethinking the exhibition programming and establishing a new space was very compelling to me - a historic organization that could be nimble!
Could you discuss the broader aims of Drawing as Practice? How does it fit into the long history of the National Academy of Design, and in what ways does it comment on both the organization's rich history and its present future place in the contemporary art world?
Aside from being a survey of the role of drawing in the Academy’s history, Drawing as Practice was organized to highlight specific tendencies and themes that we found in the National Academy’s collection of art and architectural works (which is primarily made up of “diploma works” that Academicians donate as part of their membership). The groupings included: Instruction; the Body, Portraiture, and the Figure; Plans and Proposals; Structures and Architecture; Abstraction; Motion Studies; Non-Traditional Drawing; Social Realism; and Social Commentary.
From there, we were able to build the exhibition out to include contemporary works by practitioners who are not (yet) affiliated with the Academy so that we could have a larger conversation about drawing. I was motivated by a number of factors. One is that art and architecture don’t always intersect the way the two practices can and should; by presenting a show of drawings, connections between the two disciplines become more apparent.
What I hope happens inside the exhibition is that the viewer can get a sense of the Academy’s history - which started out as the New York Drawing Association - with a selection of reproductions of casts used in drawing classes, some of which appear in 19th Century academic drawings on view by artists like Mosley Isaac Danforth (National Academician or NA) and Charles Shepard Chapman (NA) to name a few – connecting these figurative works with more contemporary architectural studies by both architects and artists; examples of public art proposals (Claes Oldenberg (NA), Avram Finkelstein, Jackie Ferrara (NA), and Mel Chin (NA)), a sense of progression from the figure, to abstraction, to nontraditional drawing, motion studies, and finally social realism (which is well represented in our collection by artists like Robert Riggs (NA), Paul Cadmus (NA), Asa Cheffetz (NA), Charles Wilbert White (NA), and Grace Albee (NA)) onto more contemporary examples of what we have been referring to as “social commentary,” which takes different forms, like agitprop, works by Judith Bernstein (NA), a series of text based prints by Hock Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, an animation by Christine Sun Kim, a micrographic drawing by Michael Waugh, large scale portraits by Shellyne Rodriguez, and prints from a series by Jenny Polak and Dread Scott (NA).
What I’m hoping comes across is that we are thinking about art and architecture expansively, and the National Academy’s future is completely intertwined with that expansive approach to art, architecture, and resulting ideas. Most importantly, I hope the experience of seeing the show allows the viewer to draw their own connections between different works on view.
The scope of Drawing as Practice is vast. What was your process for selecting works from the Academy's collection of 8,000 items? How did you develop criteria or a set of parameters to achieve the aims of this exhibition effectively? What prior professional experiences helped you the most with this endeavor?
The National Academy’s Associate Curator Natalia Viera Salgado, Director of Collections Diana Thompson, and Registrar Amanda Shields began researching for the show in the summer of 2022. Our summer intern, Victoria Thomas (whose article about drawing and the figure can be found here) started going through the collection, looking at drawing as a kind of assignment to help us formulate some criteria for the show.
Initially, it was very exploratory, but by January or February of this year, we had culled a list of around 90 artworks from the collection. In April, Natalia, Diana, and I visited the collection (which is in Delaware) with Amanda, and did a kind of sort, based on the experience of seeing the works in person. This is a hugely important aspect of the process. For example, seeing Charles Wilbert White’s “Head of Boy” (1970) was mind-blowing because in person, it looks like a relief. In its reproduction, it is beautiful, but much of its effect is lost. While there, we kept track of key phrases, like “the figure,” “structures and architecture,” and “social realism,” among others, to help guide the selection process.
Eventually, we narrowed the checklist to around 50 collection works we thought should be the exhibition's backbone. Diana has the institutional memory, so for instance, when I was writing about a pairing of works, one by Emilie Louise Gossiaux titled “True Love Will Find You in the End” (2021), and “Anastasia n.d.” by Alex Katz (NA), Diana knew Katz’s undated work was made around 1984 as a preparatory drawing for a print.
We agreed that we needed historic works from the collection. We also knew we needed to select work by living Academicians with diverse practices - think Judy Pfaff and Charles Gaines - so that we were not only not favoring a particular style, but also showing the breadth of what the National Academy has been, and continues to be.
I’ve worked with a number of collections, but I think the best example of thinking through criteria for a large community of stakeholders comes out of my experiences commissioning public art for New York City’s Percent for Art program. In many ways, one of the most exciting parts of this project was simply talking constantly with our Associate Curator Natalia about forms of drawing that intersected with both the collection of art and architecture, and the community of artists and architects who are part of the Academy. A seemingly random visual connection between two works from the collection - “Frieze Study” (1994) by Robert Mangold (NA) and “Cyclist” (2010) by Richard Artschwager (NA) suggest movement - pointing to other ideas about movement in works by Clifford Owens, “Skully” (2023) and “Bamboo Cane” (2021), and Stephen Deans’ “Targets” (2017 and 2020).
You worked directly with Natalia Viera Salgado, Associate Curator, and Diana Thompson, Director of Collections. Could you discuss your collaborative working relationships - what did they bring to the process that was essential to the overall curation of this exhibit?
Diana has the institutional memory, having worked at the Academy and with the collection longer than any of us. Her understanding of early works was instrumental in getting a handle on historical material that my training didn’t address. Natalia is a curator of contemporary art, with interests ranging from decolonial practices and environmental justice to architecture and design. While Natalia and I share many relationships to artists we’ve both worked with, her context is connected to multiple generations of Latin American and Caribbean artists and architects. The show came together quite fast while we were in the process of moving out of our old offices at the National Arts Club and into Chelsea. While at times the preparations for the show were overwhelming, it was exciting to be doing so many studio visits and to be able to follow up so quickly asking for specific works we had seen to be included in the exhibition - nearly instant gratification curating.
What were some challenges of incorporating works that “involve drawing at a critical stage of the creative process, showcasing both works in progress and finished pieces”? Did this broader definition of “drawing” cause any controversy within the Academy, and if so, how did you address that?
First, I really appreciate that you noted our definition of drawing, which is incredibly broad. The challenge at a certain point was that we worried we might run out of room (we didn’t) installing such a full show in a brand-new space. It was hard to say no to certain artists and architects and works, like there was a moment when we could have justified so many additional pieces. We haven’t had complaints about printmaking being in the mix. Here I’m thinking of “Automatism Elegy (State I White)” (1980), a lithograph by Robert Motherwell (NA), or “Modern Times” (1984), a woodcut by Robert Blackburn (NA).
I am not sure why I haven’t heard questions, but I’d like to think that members of the Academy are practitioners who get it; they know drawing is integral to so many different types of work. Better to celebrate that than to be more exacting or reductive in what constitutes a drawing. I actually became more intrigued by conversations about what makes a practice a practice. Whenever I look at the collection of artist books that archive daily drawings by Joanne Greenbaum (NA), or “In Old Age He Painted” (1986) by Dotty Attie (NA), I’m reminded of the role repetition plays in calling something a practice, and the way in which the work is never really done, never really resolved.
Drawing as Practice is the inaugural exhibition at the National Academy of Design’s new location in the Chelsea arts district - in what ways do you think this new space for the Academy might recontextualize it with New York's contemporary art world and help revitalize its original aims?
My experience of the National Academy when it was uptown is limited. I remember going to a few openings and talks, probably between 2010 and 2015. My sense was it was a place of historical import, which seemed somewhat at odds with contemporary art I was going to see.
Maybe that contrast is productive, but I see our new space as decidedly contemporary, being amongst hundreds of art galleries and a good number of noncommercial cultural organizations. Being in Chelsea is an opportunity for the National Academy to be in dialogue with a part of the cultural community that is more artist-centric. While Chelsea’s gallery scene has undergone enormous changes and expansion, in my professional trajectory, I remember Chelsea being a neighborhood of artist and design studios (in the 1990s), some of which still remain.
If your experience of Drawing as Practice centers on historic anatomical casts that have been drawn by late Academicians active in the 19th Century, or if you’re pulled into closer inspection of more contemporary instructional works by Sol LeWitt, Liliana Porter, and Catalina Schliebener Munoz, our space and the context of Chelsea is current. It’s a place where people are going to see contemporary art, and for us to be a part of that is charting a new course.
Drawing as Practice is on display until December 16, 2023, at the National Academy of Design, 519 W 26th St, 2nd Floor, New York, NY
