Open Sessions 2018-2020: What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Open Sessions 2018–2020: What’s Love Got to Do with It? is an exhibition by the thirty-one artists from Open Sessions 2018–2020, a two-year program at The Drawing Center that provides opportunities for selected artists from around the world to contextualize their work in terms of drawing through conversation, public programs, and exhibitions. Featuring new drawings and drawing adjacent works by a diverse and international group of artists, who come from myriad perspectives and geographic locations, ranging from the Americas to Africa, Asia and the Middle East, What's Love Got to Do With It? takes as its theme, the universal discourse of love, which, the curators contend, is as democratic as drawing is.

The question of drawing and love is operative in the work of Guadalupe Maravilla, when he traces his personal history of displacement from El Salvador to the United States, and interrogates the parallels between North American and pre-Columbian cultures to critique border politics. In the artwork of Alex Callender, drawing is employed to draw constellations based on the seemingly invisible labor of workers, diagramming economic decline caused by colonialism and globalization. In Victoria Keddie’s electromagnetic drawings, one’s own awareness of place and time is fine-tuned through a feedback loop of signal and noise. Perhaps the clearest example of the connection of drawing to the theme of love is articulated by Liz Collins’ long scroll drawn by the collective activity of people coming together to draw. Translations of the drawing medium in video, performance, three dimensional notation and non conventional mark-making, the works in What’s Love Got to Do with It? celebrate drawing with irreverence and wit. And most definitely with love.

About Open Sessions

Open Sessions builds on The Drawing Center’s long-standing legacy of championing work by early career artists who explore the nature of drawing in its many manifestations. Organized by curators Rosario Güiraldes and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions is a two-year program held in two year cycles created as a platform for artists to find new approaches for contextualizing and exhibiting their work, through conversation, public programs, and thematic group exhibitions.

Artists selected for Open Sessions 2018–20 include: Joeun Aatchim, Kenseth Armstead, Bahar Behbahani, Keren Benenisty, Katarina Burin, Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Alex Callender, Crystal Z Campbell, Ludovica Carbotta, Jesse Chun, Liz Collins, Mike Crane, Dennis RedMoon Darkeem, Theodore Darst, Billy and Steven Dufala, Jonathan Ehrenberg, Carolina Fusilier, Rachel Granofsky, LaMont Hamilton, Kunlin He, Victoria Keddie, Young Joo Lee, Lux Linder, Sharon Madanes, Guadalupe Maravilla, Zatara McIntyre, Ester Partegàs, Omid Shekari, Tariku Shiferaw, Johanna Unzueta, Cosmo Whyte.

Organized by Rosario Güiraldes and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions Curators