Leonardo Drew

Leonardo Drew
Born 1961
Tallahassee, Florida, US
Known for Sculptures
Website
leonardodrew.com

Leonardo Drew is an African American contemporary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He creates sculptures from found natural objects and through processes of oxidation, burning, and decay, Drew transforms these objects into massive sculptures that critique social injustices and the cycle of growth and decay in nature.

Early Life

Leonardo Drew is an African American sculptor. He was born in Tallahassee, Florida, but was raised in the projects of Bridgeport, Connecticut. During his early childhood, Drew often played at a dump by his childhood home. It is here that Drew began to build sculptures from found objects. Drew created works from salvaged trash, and repurposed them to give them a new meaning. He often refers to the dump as “God’s Mouth” [1] because it was a place of death and rebirth.


Career

Leonardo began his artistic career at a very young age, exhibiting his work publicly for the first time at the age of 13. His initial work in drawing drew the attention of talent scouts from DC Comics, Marvel Comics and Heavy Metal magazine. [2] After being introduced to abstraction through reproductions of works by artists like Jackson Pollock and receiving inspiration from the process-based work of post-war American and European artists, Drew decided to focus on his fine arts training and immersed himself in exploring his own sense of abstraction. He then went on to attend Parsons School of Design in New York, and received his BFA from Cooper Union in 1985.

Number 133

His works are part of several major public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Saint Louis Museum, Saint Louis, MO; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; and Pérez Art Museum Miami in Miami, FL.[3] He has also collaborated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, on a production entitled 'Ground Level Overlay,'[4] and has participated in several artist residencies including those at ArtPace, San Antonio and The Studio Museum of Harlem in New York, among others.[5]

Number 45 (detail)




Work

In 1988, Leonardo Drew found his artistic voice when creating his seminal work Number 8, which he believes begat everything that followed.[6] It was made from wood, paper, rope, feathers and animal hides, but despite the use of a raccoon skull and dead birds, the piece does not smell.[7] Number 8 was first exhibited at Kenkeleba House in New York City in 1989 where it was "immediately recognized as an aggressive assertion of an artistic identity wrought from personal experience and cultural heritage."[8] Its ominous allure embodies the death and decay that becomes prevalent in all of his work.

In the early 1990s, Drew began to incorporate the element of rust in many of works by producing it chemically in the studio as well as using collected pieces of scrap metal collected from the streets of New York. These early works from the 1990s were exhibited in several spaces including The Carnegie International. In 1992, Drew had his first major solo exhibition at the Thread Waxing Space in New York, which included a published catalogue with an essay written by writer and critic Hilton Als. The exhibition included many large-scale abstract sculptures made from various materials including wood, rust and cotton.

Later on that year, Drew was invited to display work in the Senegal biennial. During his time in Africa, he visited an African slave trading post. Here he learned from first hand accounts of the "horrific and claustrophobic conditions"[9] that the slaves had to endure for months before being shipped out to their new homes. This experience deeply affected the execution and meaning of his work. Number 43 is an example of one of the sculptures he created after visiting Africa. The repetition of hundreds of closely packed dingy boxes references the captives' disgusting and densely packed homes. Drew filled some of the boxes with cotton rags and wooden debris to further symbolize the horrid living conditions of the slaves.

New York Times art critic Roberta Smith describes his large reliefs as “ pocked, splintered, seemingly burned here, bristling there, unexpectedly delicate elsewhere. An endless catastrophe seen from above. The energies intimated in these works are beyond human control, bigger than all of us”[10]Drew is known for creating reflective abstract sculptural works that play upon the dystopic tension between order and chaos.[11] Leonardo Drew’s work is reminiscent of Post Minimalist sculpture that alludes to America’s industrial past. The materials also reference the plight of African Americans in U.S. history.[12] One could find many meanings in his work, but it seems that he is ultimately concerned with the cyclical nature of life and decay in nature, which can be seen in the grid and the transformation of raw material - lumber, steel, canvas, paper - to resemble debris.[13] This method generates what one would call an articulation of entropy and a visual erosion of time.

Number 43

The mid-career survey exhibition, Existed: Leonardo Drew, was inaugurated in 2009 at the Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston and later traveled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC and the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA. A monograph of his work was published in conjunction with the exhibition by Giles, Ltd., London, with critical essays written by museum director and curator Claudia Schmuckli and professor and cultural historian, Allen S. Weiss.[3]

In 2012, Drew had his fourth solo exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York that included the publication of a catalogue that chronicles his artistic production from 2007 to 2012 produced by Charta Books.[14] The exhibition featured several large scale installation and works that have been described as imbued with "the kind of energetic core typical of many of Drew's sculptures, as is the blurring of distinctions between what's swallowing or bursting from what's natural or constructed."[15]










Selected Solo Exhibitions

References

  1. ↑ "A Trash Course In Sculpture". Washingtonpost.com. 2010-10-30. Retrieved 2014-10-21.
  2. ↑ "Viewing Life's Decay". Washingtonpost.com. 2000-03-26. Retrieved 2014-04-30.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 On View Sep 18, 2010 - Jan 09, 2011. "Existed: Leonardo Drew". deCordova. Retrieved 2014-01-30.
  4. ↑ "On View: Emotionally Charged Abstraction by Leonardo Drew". Arts Observer. Retrieved 2014-04-30.
  5. ↑ "The Artist’s Voice: Leonardo Drew | The Studio Museum in Harlem". Studiomuseum.org. 2012-04-12. Retrieved 2014-01-30.
  6. ↑ "Blaffer’s Leonardo Drew survey hits a home run". Houston Chronicle. 2009-07-12. Retrieved 2014-10-21.
  7. ↑ "Viewing Life's Decay". The Boston Globe. 2010-10-30. Retrieved 2014-10-21.
  8. ↑ Schmuckli, Claudia, "Being and Somethingness," Existed: Leonardo Drew, D Giles Limited, 2009.
  9. ↑ [http://www.mutualart.com/OpenArticle/Beauty-in-the-Abandoned/E58B7C842CD62DE1> "Beauty in the Abandoned"]. Mutual Art. 2009-07-16. Retrieved 2014-10-20.
  10. ↑ "Swagger and Sideburns: Bad Boys in Galleries". New York Times. 2010-02-11. Retrieved 2014-04-30.
  11. ↑ Fishman, George. "PAMM, Virginia Miller exhibits explore abstraction - Visual Arts". MiamiHerald.com. Retrieved 2014-04-30.
  12. ↑ "North South East West". Chateau DuBois. 2010-02-11. Retrieved 2014-10-22.
  13. ↑ "/ critics' picks". Artforum.com. Retrieved 2014-04-30.
  14. ↑ Ebony, David (2013-01-18). "Leonardo Drew - Reviews - Art in America". Artinamericamagazine.com. Retrieved 2014-04-30.
  15. ↑ Proenza, Mary. "Leonardo Drew," Art in America, January 18, 2013.

External links