The Drawing Center

On Thursday, April 28, printmaker, Andrew Stein Raftery, demonstrated the art of engraving, showing the highly-magnified details of engravings from the past 500 years, including works by Albrecht Dürer, Marcantonio Raimondi, and James Siena. With a close examination in raking light, the tactile nature of these prints and the individuality of each artist’s hand was revealed.

Click here to listen to a recording of Raftery’s presentation.

On March 30, 2011, The Drawing Center and Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Platform presented a panel discussion on artist/architect Yona Friedman’s legacy. The event celebrated the recent exhibition which used Friedman’s theoretical project, Spatial City as a point of a departure from which to bring together for the first time a selection of international works from the FRAC, Regional Collections of Contemporary Art in France. Spatial City: An Architecture of Idealism was on view in Milwaukee, Chicago and Detroit in 2009-2010. Panelists included Nicholas Frank, Curator at Invova, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Sylvie Froux, Laurence Gateau, and Emmanuel Latreille,  directors of Fonds Regionaux d’Art Contemporain (FRAC), and Kristina Solomoukha, artist.  Luis Croquer, Director of MOCAD Detroit was also present. Moderated by Brett Littman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center.

Click here to listen to the audio recording of the panel discussion.

On Thursday, March 3, novelist Lynne Tillman performed a reading of her new essayistic story, Drawing from a Translation Artist, which appears in the Drawing Papers edition published in conjunction with Drawn from Photography. She also read from her forthcoming collection of stories, Someday This Will Be Funny.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the reading.

Lynne Tillman’s most recent novel, American Genius, A Comedy, was published by Soft Skull Press. Other novels include Cast in Doubt and No Lease On Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction. Her nonfiction books include an essay collection, The Broad Picture, and The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965-67, based on Stephen Shore’s photographs. Her story collections include This Is Not It, 23 fictions written in response to the work of 22 contemporary artists. Tillman’s fiction and criticism appear in Black Clock, Bomb, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Artforum, Frieze, Bookforum, Art in America, Aperture, and The New York Times Book Review. She is the fiction editor of Fence magazine. In 2006 Tillman was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. This April, a new collection of her stories, Someday This Will Be Funny, will be published by Richard Nash’s Red Lemonade Press.

On Thursday, January 6 at 6:30pm, Susan Lee, a tax preparer who has worked with freelancers and artists for over twenty years, gave a presentation about financial issues confronted by artists. Click here to listen to a recording.

Also a Certified Financial Planner, Lee has spoken on the tax issues facing artists at organizations such as the Graphic Artists Guild, Artists in the Market Place, Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, Columbia University, School of Visual Arts, The Center for Book Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. Susan has a weekly personal holistic financial radio show, You And Your Money, on WBAI-FM in NYC and a website dedicated to taxation issues for freelancers at freelancetaxation.com.

Click here to download an informational packet.

Law School for Visual Artists
Copyright, Agreements, and Employment Issues
Thursday, December 16, 6:30pm

On Thursday, December 16, artist and art lawyer, Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento, gave a presentation for contemporary artists about relevant legal issues. Click here to listen to the talk.

Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento received his BA in Art from the University of Texas-El Paso; MFA in Art from CalArts; Van Lier Fellow in Studio Art at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program; and JD from Cornell Law School. He is currently Associate Director for Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts; Adjunct Professor of Art & Law at the Tisch School at NYU; and Adjunct Instructor of Clinical Law at Brooklyn Law School. His work has been shown nationally and internationally, and he has published essays and projects in various art and legal journals. Sarmiento’s website project on art and law may be viewed at clancco.com.

On Thursday, June 17, Aaron Wexler gave the final presentation ina series of four talks in which emerging artists discuss the influence and relevancy of drawing within their multifaceted practices. With diversity in both technique and approach, the artists in this series share an affinity for integrating drawing into a wide range of mediums – painting, sculpture, installation, mixed media – to critically investigate subjects of interest to them be it economics, politics, quantum physics, the human subconscious, or personal narrative. These artists’ unique forays into conceptual thinking and theoretical significance further broaden our conceptions of the field of drawing and highlight current trends and issues in contemporary art.

Aaron Wexler looks to the traditions of early Modernist collage and formal aesthetics alongside new media to create complex matrixes of acrylic and paper on panel. Swirling, nebulous accumulations of geo-shapes and patterns drawn from nature synthesize abstraction and figuration, employing imagery that is vaguely familiar yet strangely enigmatic. Wexler was born in 1974 in Philadelphia, PA. He earned an M.F.A in 1999 from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and a B.F.A. in 1996 from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. He has had solo exhibitions in New York, London, and Milan, and has been included in numerous group exhibitions at venues including The Saatchi Gallery in London, The National Academy Museum in New York, and Apexart, New York. He lives and works in New York City. Click Here to Listen to the Talk.