Name: Ericka Beckman: Power of the Spin
Start: 2025-02-07
End: 2025-05-11
Location: The Drawing Center

EB019 — Ericka Beckman, *Power of the Spin (You The Better),* 1982. Oilstick, graphite pencil, and fiber-tipped pen on paper, 30 x 39 1/2 inches (76.2 x 100.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the artist 2014.4 © Ericka Beckman

EB012 — Ericka Beckman, *Circle Game Study*, 1982. Oil pastel, fiber-tipped pen, and graphite pencil on paper, 24 x 36 inches (61 x 91.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Drawing Committee 2014.9 © Ericka Beckman

EB023 — Ericka Beckman, *Study for Selectric (Industrial Series)*, 2015 (from 1988 notebook). Charcoal, graphite and pastel on paper, 37.5 x 32 inches (95.3 x 81.3 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich

EB018 — Ericka Beckman, *Study for Center of the Spin (You The Better),* 1983. Charcoal, oil on paper, 35 x 46 inches (88.9 x 116.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich

EB035 — Ericka Beckman, *Cinderella 6*, 1985. Charcoal on paper, 22 x 30 inches (55.9 x 76.2 cm). Collection of MAMCO, anonymous donation

EB025 — Ericka Beckman, *Study for Cinderella’s Robots,* 2015 (from 1988 notebook). Charcoal, graphite and pastel on paper, 38 x 31 in (96.5 x 78.7 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich

A filmmaker who came to prominence in the late 1970s, Ericka Beckman is considered a key figure of the Pictures Generation, a group of American conceptual artists who appropriated images from popular culture for the purpose of cultural critique. Distinct from many artists working in the medium of film, Beckman takes an emphatically handmade approach to her work, making her own props and sets, as well as elaborate preparatory drawings. Her practice deals with gameplay and systems, often adopting and subverting classic tropes like fairytales to challenge societal norms.

Power of the Spin features more than twenty of Beckman’s drawings, ranging from sketches and storyboards to large-scale finished compositions created at different moments throughout her career. These drawings are accompanied by the continuous screening of two new films by Beckman in the lower-level gallery. Stalk is an adaptation of the fairytale Jack and the Beanstalk, which was first presented as a live performance in Performa 2021. In this film, Beckman reimagines elements of this well known narrative to critique today’s industrialized agricultural systems, exploring the economic issues of late capitalism and its catastrophic impact on small independent farmers. Ericka Beckman: Power of the Spin also features a short film created for the exhibition entitled Study for Rapunzel-The Game, featuring an excerpt from John Zorn’s The Clavicle of Solomon

Ericka Beckman: Power of the Spin is organized by Claire Gilman, Former Chief Curator of The Drawing Center and current Acquavella Curator and Department Head of Modern and Contemporary Drawing at The Morgan Library and Museum with Isabella Kapur, Assistant Curator of Research.

Ericka Beckman

Ericka Beckman (b. 1951) is known for her experimental cinematic work and her expansion of the film medium through a plastic, spatially immersive dimension that also assigns an active role to the viewer. Throughout her career, Beckman has decoded cultural representation, examining and depicting the underlying norms, especially the notion of performance and the constant optimization of our working and living environments. In her repeated references to play as a fundamental structural device of our capitalist order, as well as to anthropological theories by Jean Piaget or Roger Callois, Beckman artistically anticipated the emergence of social media and the so-called gamification of our contemporary experience. Her work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou, the High Museum of Art, The Broad, MAMCO Geneva (Musée d’art moderne et contemporain), and numerous private collections.