Opening Reception: Open Sessions 2018–2020: What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Image: Kunlin He, 2092: Tale of Moon Trip, 2019. Acrylic and ink drawing on aluminum, mylar, and acrylic sheet, 132 × 72 inches. Courtesy of the artist and NanHai Art.
Image: Kunlin He, 2092: Tale of Moon Trip, 2019. Acrylic and ink drawing on aluminum, mylar, and acrylic sheet, 132 × 72 inches. Courtesy of the artist and NanHai Art.

Join us on August 15 from 6-8pm for the Opening Reception ofOpen Sessions 2018–2020: What’s Love Got to Do with It? No RSVP needed.

Open Sessions 2018–2020: What’s Love Got to Do with It? is an exhibition by the thirty-one artists who are participating in Open Sessions, 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.

Organized by Rosario Güiraldes and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions Curators

Participating artists:

Joeun Kim Aatchim

Kenseth Armstead

Bahar Behbahani

Keren Benbenisty

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 Lindner

Sharon Madanes

Guadalupe Maravilla

Zatara McIntyre

Ester Partegàs

Omid Shekari

Tariku Shiferaw

Johanna Unzueta

Cosmo Whyte

Open Sessions is made possible by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Further Forward Foundation, and, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.