Recommended Databases
SMFA Print Periodicals
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The comics journalPrint issues available at the SMFA Library, Tisch, and online.
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Raw visionQuarterly, print issues
SMFA Online Periodicals
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Master drawingsTisch and online issues
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DrawingOnline issues
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The pastel journalOnline issues
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Creative quarterlyOnline issues
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American artist drawingOnline issues
Want to browse the stacks? Look at these call numbers
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NC15 - 850 |
Drawing |
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NC765 |
Figure Drawing |
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NC95 - 96 |
20th and 21st Century Drawing |
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NC780 - 783.8 |
Figure Drawing |
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NC730 |
Technique |
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NC850 - 950 |
Graphic art materials |
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NC748 - 750 |
Perspective |
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NC960 - 978.5 |
Illustration |
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NC760 |
Anatomical Drawing |
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PN6700 - 6790 |
Comic books, graphic novels, etc. |
Featured Drawing Titles
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Ashmolean Now
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* First Oxford show for Pio Abad * Inspiration for the art includes Benin bronzes, and discussed by Dan Hicks (author of The British Museum) * Accompanies an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum from 9 February to 8 September, 2024 Pio Abad's artistic practice is concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects. His wide-ranging body of work, encompassing drawing, painting, textiles, installation and text, mines alternative or repressed historical events and offers counternarratives that draw out threads of complicity between incidents, ideologies and people. Deeply informed by unfolding events in the Philippines, where the artist was born and raised, his work emanates from a family narrative woven into the nation's story. Abad's parents were at the forefront of the anti-dictatorship struggle in the Philippines during the 1970s and 80s and it is the need to remember this history that has shaped the foundations of his work. This beautifully designed book accompanies the Ashmolean Museum's second exhibition of its new Ashmolean NOW series, featuring the work of Pio Abad. Abad's artistic practice is concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects. His wide-ranging body of work, which includes drawing, painting, installation, textiles and text, mines alternative or repressed historical events, offering counternarratives. Abad's new works link narratives found in the Museum's collections and Oxford with his personal life in the UK and Philippines, where the artist was born and raised. The book features a new text by Abad and contributions by art historical experts including Dan Hicks.
Call Number: SMFA: N7329.A232 A4 2024 -
Camille Henrot: Milkyways
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Milkyways is a collection of essays by artist Camille Henrot, exploring the ambivalence of motherhood and the process of creation in both art-making and life. Each chapter delivers a cosmos of references in literature, cartoons, art history, psychoanalysis, and more - from ancient maternity myths to modern maternity wards; from Marcel Proust to Maggie Nelson to Hélène Cixous. Alongside illustrations of the artist's work in painting, drawing, and sculpture, Henrot's perspectives in writing oscillate freely between the personal and the societal, the obvious and the more complex, the visceral and the utterly mundane. Milkyways was originally conceived for Republik magazine on invitation by Antje Stahl. Written with Jacob Bromberg, Antje Stahl, and Léa Trudel.
Call Number: SMFA: N6853.H46 A4 2023 -
Ellsworth Kelly
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An eye-opening presentation of largely unknown figurative drawings by a renowned pioneer of abstraction Featuring one hundred figurative works on paper by Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), this volume shows a new side of an artist best known for abstraction. These informal depictions of friends and expressive self-portraits--all rarely or never previously displayed or published--span the entirety of Kelly's career, from the mid-1940s to the early 2000s. Throughout his life, Kelly made portraits as a means of keeping his hand adept at drawing, which provided a place to test his ideas, refine his bold use of lines, and interrogate the space between naturalism and abstraction. These works also capture his social milieu, which intersected with other creative circles and the queer community. He painstakingly recorded how his own appearance changed over time, and once described some of these sketches by saying, "I use myself in order to draw." The accompanying critical essays unpack the ways in which such intimate efforts were fundamental to Kelly's practice and situate this important aspect of his work within the artist's wider oeuvre. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: Art Institute of Chicago (July 1-October 23, 2023)
Call Number: SMFA: NC139.K37 A4 2023 -
Forces of Nature
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The arrival of the greatest single panel cartoonist since Charles Addams One swing trapeze artist prepares to receive a newborn child from another all the while shrieking "Support the head!" A hopeful, naked Adam reaches high for the largest leaf while a frustrated Eve hands him a smaller, more-appropriately sized leaf. A dejected squid stands in a doorway, shock and dismay on his face, as a ruined surprise party lies in wait before him--guests, presents, and birthday cake covered in a blast of ink in mid-"Sur..." as loose balloons butt against the ceiling. Once in generation, a distinctly new perspective emerges from the pages of The New Yorker. In our times, that perspective belongs to Ed Steed. Steeped in the classic formalist tradition of the single-panel gag, Steed possesses a shocking and macabre talent for drawings guaranteed to make even the most composed of casual readers laugh out loud. At times reminiscent of Charles Addams, George Booth, William Steig, Saul Steinberg, and Edward Gorey, the artist defies the blasé, urbanite's worldview of the magazine in which his comics appear. If anyone has described a New Yorker cartoon to you at a cocktail party recently it is almost certainly a "Steed." Forces of Nature is the first of what promises to be many award-winning collections by this young man with an old cartooning soul.
Call Number: SMFA: NC1479.S794 A4 2024 -
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound
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"[The Ivorian artist] Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (1923-2014) created an unmistakable and entirely unique body of work, first as a writer and linguist, and then in a dazzling series of colorful drawings on a multitude of subjects, from his native Bété culture to the urban milieu of Abidjan to the all-encompassing themes of fraternity, equality and global understanding. All but unknown even in his home country of Côte d'Ivoire, Bouabré found international recognition in 1989 when he participated in the landmark Paris exhibition Magiciens de la terre, and his work has since been the subject of solo and group exhibitions around the world. Published to accompany the first museum survey of Bouabré's work in North America, this catalog offers a vivid account of the artist's long and multifaceted career, including a detailed chronology of his life and reproductions of more than six hundred of his drawings. An essay by curator Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi introduces Bouabré to a new audience, illuminating his significance as both an important African creator and one of the most intriguing artists of the twentieth century."-- Back cover.
Call Number: SMFA Library: NC367.6.I83 B782 2022 -
Gonzalo Fuenmayor: Tropical Burn
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This volume leads into a lush world where assumptions about exoticism and colonialism are turned on their head, revealing nuances about human identity. Miami-based artist Gonzalo Fuenmayor (born 1977) draws from the experience of his birthplace of Colombia as well as the United States. But his opulent, Victorian-era façades explore a darker colonial subtext, where power struggles and displacement take the form of fallen palm trees and bunches of bananas. He deconstructs McDonald's and other commercial icons to playfully subvert the power of consumerist industry while exploring the impact of North American business practices around the world. This monograph displays the breadth and rigor of Gonzalo Fuenmayor's work during his residency at Oolite Arts, one of Miami's largest organizations supporting visual artists. Diving deep into Fuenmayor's studio, one encounters each drawing as a world unto itself with profound insights about what it means to practice as a Latin American artist today.
Call Number: SMFA Library: NC206.F84 A4 2021 -
Ibrahim el-Salahi: Pain Relief Drawings
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The exhibition publication Ibrahim El-Salahi: Pain Relief Drawings features drawings from El-Salahi's latest series, titled Pain Relief. Drafted on the back of medicine packets, pill bottle labels, envelopes, and scraps of paper, El-Salahi’s intricate pen and ink Pain Relief drawings serve as a form of respite for the 92-year-old artist, who finds diversion from his chronic pain through his daily drawing practice.
Born in 1930 in Omdurman, Sudan, Ibrahim El-Salahi is one of the most significant artists in African and Arab modernism. A British citizen for decades, El-Salahi’s drawings are deeply connected to postwar European modernism, but also are profoundly embedded in a tradition of African and Islamic art history. After studying at the Slade School of Art in London, El-Salahi returned to Khartoum in the late 1950s to become a founding member of the celebrated Khartoum School, a bellwether group of artists that represented the flowering of modernism in the Islamic world. Inspired by Arabic calligraphy, as well as Surrealist figuration and geometric abstraction, El-Salahi created a distinctive visual language that he expresses most prolifically in drawing.
Call Number: SMFA: N7397.6.S733 S2532 2022 -
Keith Haring
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A fascinating look at Keith Haring's New York City subway artwork from the 1980s Celebrated artist Keith Haring (1958-1990) has been embraced by popular culture for his signature bold graphic line drawings of figures and forms. Like other graffiti artists in the 1980s, Haring found an empty canvas in the advertising panels scattered throughout New York City's subway system, where he communicated his socially conscious, often humorous messages on platforms and train cars. Over a five-year period, in an epic conquest of civic space, Haring produced a massive body of subway artwork that remains daunting in its scale and its impact on the public consciousness. Dedicated to the individuals who might encounter them and to the moments of their creation, Haring's drawings now exist solely in the form of documentary photographs and legend. Because they were not meant to be permanent--only briefly inhabiting blacked-out advertising boards before being covered up by ads or torn down by authorities or admirers--what little remains of this project is uniquely fugitive. Keith Haring: 31 Subway Drawings reproduces archival materials relating to this magnificent project alongside essays by leading Haring experts. Distributed for No More Rulers
Call Number: SMFA: NC139.H3 A4 2021 -
Kiki Kogelnik. Now Is the Time
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First extensive monograph on Kiki Kogelnik, a real must-have about one of the most important Austrian born female Pop Art artists Kiki Kogelnik (1935-1997) is one of the most important Austrian born artists of the 20th century who lived and worked on an international level. She is considered the only Austrian protagonist of Pop Art, although her art goes far beyond this categorization. Kogelnik's playful, colorful, and highly political work ranges from paintings, drawings, ceramics and installations to performative practices, and has an astonishing topicality in terms of its subject matter. Already in the early 1960s, she addressed topics such as gender equality, medical ethics, the digital era or a sustainable lifestyle in her art--questions that are highly present in today's daily discourses.
Call Number: SMFA: N6811.5.K5557 A4 2023 -
Mel Bochner Drawings
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A groundbreaking examination of Mel Bochner's inventive drawing practice produced collaboratively with the artist Encompassing both works on paper and oversized wall drawings made from the 1960s to the present, this handsomely designed volume documents the first-ever museum retrospective of drawings by Mel Bochner (b. 1940). Drawing has long been critical to the work of this pioneering conceptual artist, and essayists explore the theoretical framework and playful experimentation of his decades-long practice. The book, conceived and designed in close collaboration with the artist, features his own writings about his philosophy of wall drawings and reflections on significant exhibitions of his work. Bochner was a key figure of the Minimalist and Conceptual Art movements whose first exhibition in 1966 is now recognized as seminal. Today the artist is known for works in a range of media that explore the conventions of language and visual art as well as the relationships between them; his experimental works on paper, canvas, and wall--all of which are celebrated here--are a foundational facet of his practice and a critical influence on contemporary art. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: Art Institute of Chicago (April 23-August 22, 2022)
Call Number: SMFA: NC139.B625 A4 2022 -
Otto Piene: Paths to Paradise
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Otto Piene: Paths to Paradise accompanies an extensive museum exhibition that features the visionary, intermedial works of Otto Piene (1928-2014). This catalogue presents new scholarship on the development of his imaginative approaches to interlace art, science, and nature and uncover strategies of coping in an increasingly uncertain world. In the spirit of Piene's transatlantic career, this richly illustrated catalogue features essays by emerging and established art historians and curators from the U.S. and Europe. Shedding light on the life-affirming vision Piene developed in the wake of World War II, these texts consider the ambition of his work in a range of media and contexts-television, kinetic sculpture, drawing, painting, performance-that incorporates the ephemeral through its atmospheric effects and shared social experiences.
Call Number: SMFA: N6888.P47 A4 2024 -
Out of Paper
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A dynamic look at how artists used paper to radically redefine the relationship between the body and its surroundings, and to propose new conceptions of ecology From sketches created inside pants pockets to paper-strewn performances that took cues from protests and riots, the work on paper in the 1960s acted as a mobile, flexible connective tissue between the body and the world around it. In this book, Katie Anania reveals how artists Carolee Schneemann, William Anastasi, Richard Tuttle, Robert Morris, and Charles White harnessed this historically intimate medium during a period in which Americans were becoming urgently concerned with identity, consumer culture, the overreach of state power, and the rapidly deteriorating natural world. Her reexamination of drawing shows how the omnipresence of paper facilitated artists' critiques of dominant systems, from modern throwaway culture to bureaucracy to colonial violence. Engaging a wide range of actions--such as recycling, recording, cutting, planning, and erasing--Anania offers fresh insights into paper's role not merely as a preparatory medium but one essential to the histories of performance, minimalist, conceptual, and land art. Out of Paper uses materiality studies, social history, and feminist art historical methods to situate paper as a major conduit for thought in the postwar United States.
Call Number: SMFA: NC95 .A63 2024 -
Paper and Light
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This volume looks at the techniques and materials that artists have utilized since the Renaissance to create spectacular light effects in drawings. The treatment of light and shadow is one of the building blocks of drawing. From techniques such as highlights and reserves, to material selection and the creation of translucent tracing paper, to the use of light as a medium for viewing artworks, artists for hundreds of years have found innovative and dazzling ways to create light on a sheet of paper. This publication examines the central relationship between paper and light in the world of drawings in western European art from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Focusing on drawings from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, as well as works from the British Museum, Musée du Louvre, and others, and featuring masterful works by such artists as Parmigianino, Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolas Poussin, Odilon Redon, Edgar Degas, and Georges Seurat, Paper and Light will entice readers to look longer and more closely at drawings, deriving an even deeper appreciation for the skill and labor that went into them. This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from October 15, 2024, to January 19, 2025.
Call Number: SMFA: NC755 .B76 2024 -
Paperwork
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PAPERWORK brings together a selection of drawings made between 2015 and 2024 by the artist Sangram Majumdar. Presented as direct facsimiles, these works open a rare and generous window into Majumdar's highly layered and iterative drawing process where recurring figurative imagery, decorative motifs, and elements from Indian folklore interweave to explore ideas of intimacy, obfuscation, power dynamics, and bodily gesture. Many of these works closely mirror some of his paintings, while others indicate paths not taken or yet to explored. Bookending these rich and varied images is a wonderfully poetic and luminous text by curator Jordan Amirkhani and an equally insightful conversation with painter Kyle Staver.
Call Number: SMFA: NC139.M35 A4 2025 -
Portrait of a Body
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A portrait of flourishing desire in a body ever-changing As she examines her life experience and traumas with great care, Delporte faces the questions about gender and sexuality that both haunt and entice her. Deeply informed by her personal relationships as much as queer art and theory, Portrait of a Body is both a joyous and at times hard meditation on embodiment--a journey to be reunited with the self in an attempt to heal pain and live more authentically. Delporte's idyllic colored pencil drawings contrast with the near urgency that structures her confessional memoir. Each page is laden with revelation and enveloped in organic, natural shapes--rocks, flowers, intertwined bodies, women's hair blowing in the wind--captured with devotion. The vitality of these forms interspersed with Delporte's flowing handwriting hold space for her vivid and affecting observations. Skillfully translated by Helge Dascher and Karen Houle, Portrait of a Body provokes us to remain open to the lessons our bodies have on offer.
Call Number: SMFA: PN6733.D45 P678 2024 -
Ruth Asawa Through Line
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A groundbreaking examination of how the act of drawing was a vital component of Ruth Asawa's multifaceted art "A revelatory exhibition. . . . [A] fine exhibition catalog."--Nancy Princenthal, New York Times, "Critic's Pick" Ruth Asawa (1926-2013), widely known for her looped-wire sculptures, was an inveterate drawer. She filled sketchbook after sketchbook and even stated that drawing was central to her sculpture. This volume is the first to consider the significance of drawing in Asawa's oeuvre throughout her career, featuring essays that examine the range of Asawa's aesthetic maneuvers across materials and techniques; how Asawa's drawing intertwined with the Bay Area arts community and her contributions to public education as a teacher and organizer; and the influence of Josef Albers's pedagogy and Asawa's lifelong adoption of his type of paper folding. Tracing Asawa's artistic journey from her first formal art lessons in a Japanese American internment camp during World War II through her time at Black Mountain College and beyond, this comprehensive overview of the artist's drawings includes reproductions of more than one hundred works--many of which have never been published--organized into eight thematic sections that cut through time, reflecting an art-making practice that was more circular or cyclical than linear. Distributed for the Menil Collection and the Whitney Museum of American Art Exhibition Schedule: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (September 16, 2023-January 15, 2024) The Menil Collection, Houston (March 22-July 21, 2024)
Call Number: SMFA: N6537.A74 A4 2023 -
Virology
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Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Literary Hub A leading microbiologist tackles the scientific and sociopolitical impact of viruses in eleven striking essays. Invisible in the food we eat, the people we kiss, and inside our own bodies, viruses flourish--with the power to shape not only our health, but our social, political, and economic systems. Drawing on his expertise in microbiology, Joseph Osmundson brings readers under the microscope to understand the structure and mechanics of viruses and to examine how viruses like HIV and COVID-19 have redefined daily life. Osmundson's buoyant prose builds on the work of the activists and thinkers at the forefront of the HIV/AIDS crisis and critical scholars like José Esteban Munoz to navigate the intricacies of risk reduction, draw parallels between queer theory and hard science, and define what it really means to "go viral." This dazzling multidisciplinary collection offers novel insights on illness, sex, and collective responsibility. Virology is a critical warning, a necessary reflection, and a call for a better future.
Call Number: SMFA: QR368 .O86 2022 -
Vitamin D3: Today's Best in Contemporary Drawing
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"Over the past 50 years, drawing has been elevated from a supporting role to a primary medium, ranking alongside painting as a central art form. Since the publication of Vitamin D (2005) and D2 (2013), contemporary artists have continued to explore drawing's possibilities - from intimate to large-scale works, in a diversity of mark-making processes and materials. Vitamin D3 showcases more than 100 such artists, nominated by more than 70 international art experts. The more than 70 nominators include: Iwona Blazwick, Louisa Buck, Mark Coetzee, Thelma Golden, Laura Hoptman, Geeta Kapur, Pablo Leon de la Barra, Christine Macel, Kate Macfarlane, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Zoe Whitley. The more than 100 artists include: Miriam Cahn, Robert Crumb, Tom Friedman, Tania Kovats, Claudette Johnson, Rashid Johnson, Otobong Nkanga, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Deanna Petherbridge, Christina Quarles, Qiu Zhijie, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Wael Shawky, Emma Talbot, and Johanna Unzueta"--Publisher's description
Call Number: SMFA: NC96 .V583 2021 -
Ways of Seeing: Three Takes on the Jack Shear Drawing Collection
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"Featuring nearly a hundred drawings by thirteen international artists, Drawing in the Continuous Present explores how a new generation of artists is placing drawing at the center of contemporary art discourse. Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name, this volume brings together works on paper by some of today’s most significant artistic voices, highlighting modes of drawing that reflect a multiplicity of experience and a diversity of artistic production."-- Provided by publisher
Call Number: SMFA: NC15.N54 D73 2022
