Wall Drawings 1992

Wall Drawings 1992 was an exhibition of on-site installations created for The Drawing Center. The exhibition presented the work of Nicole Eisenman, Celia Álvarez Muñoz, and Gary Simmons. Although Wall Drawings 1992 wasn't a thematic exhibition, all the artists shared an interest in the iconography of American culture—both how icons are interpreted historically and how they continue to be experienced today.

Nicole Eisenman covered one wall of The Drawing Center with a timely and sardonic mural, commenting on the then-current obsession with "family values." While Eisenman's dense pictorial style is reminiscent of W.P.A. murals, she mocked her predecessors in a forceful approach to contemporary subject matter. A central component of Eisenman's composition included a triumphal arch, crowned by the quintessential nuclear family. Decorating the arch were a multitude of pictorial vignettes, subverting the familial reign of authority.

Structured around the following quotation: "I love you like a daughter, Carmen, but who's the foreman, me or you?," Celia Álvarez Muñoz created a wall drawing which recognized the history of labor during the 1930s and 1940s. During this time women, particularly minority women, entered the work force to supply labor for World War II. This piece operated as a memorial to the place of women within labor history and acknowledged their difficult but dignified battle for the right to organize and resist oppression in the workplace. Equally, it was a testament to the labor of women today and, as Celia Álvarez Muñoz states, "the feminization of poverty."

Gary Simmons created a giant chalkboard on the back wall of The Drawing Center, covering it with smudged images of early Disney cartoon characters representing Black stereotypes. The crow characters from "Dumbo" were lightly sketched and then partially erased, suggesting the layers of meaning they transmit historically and how such images function in contemporary society. The racist history of the word "crow," from Jim Crow Laws to "eating crow," is, as Simmons shows, embodied in the "Dumbo" characters and then offered to children as harmless entertainment. Far from a critique limited to the moment such images were created, Simmons suggests that the crows are representative of the pervasive but concealed racism that exists today.

The exhibition was accompanied by a free brochure which included an essay by Faye Hirsch.