NCMA Virtual Exhibitions

By the North Carolina Museum of Art

Leonardo Drew

Number 215B

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Number 215B, which Drew refers to as a “color explosion,” is a site-responsive installation that will change each time it is shown, expanding or shrinking to fit its surroundings. It is constructed of pieces of wood that Drew first covered with a mixture of paint and sand, and then smashed, broke, and reconfigured into an explosive composition of color and shape.

“You can feel in Number 215B that there is an energy bursting out from the core,” Drew says. “In the beginning, when building my compositions, I have two starting points that push energy between them … It looks visually complicated, but there is a grid, and from there I start adding other elements.”

Number 13S

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As can be seen in Number 13S, Drew often starts a work with the pure structure of a grid but quickly disrupts the rigid order of minimalism with works like this that sprawl outside of the lines—a complex construction of stacked and layered geometric blocks that is also messy, chaotic, dense, and disruptive.

Number 51S

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Drew’s love of materials and his highly skilled craftsmanship come to the forefront in works like Number 51S. Obsessively detailed, this organic “wave” of wood undulates across the wall and brings to mind natural formations: geologic strata, waves of water, animal lairs and nests, ancient baskets, and handmade dwellings. Bristled like a porcupine, its stippled surface is constructed out of a multitude of wooden sticks sourced from manufactured wood mulch that Drew laboriously cuts, shapes, and re-forms into a sensuous, organic, biomorphic shape.

Other than wave, what words describe this piece of art?

Number 99

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In Number 99, Drew creates a multipart, abstract composition that incorporates rust and corrosion with other materials, employing his unique processes for manufacturing and accelerating corrosion in his studio.

In reference to his tendency to master a specific material, like rust or cotton, he aims to “wring it for all it’s worth,” he says, and then move on. “I have a tendency to sort of touch something, and if I feel it’s done, then I move on … I’ve always been that way—wanting to be challenged by the next new thing, looking for the ‘what if.’ I need the challenge, so I continue to give up signatures, like working with rust or cotton.”

Number 235

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Drew grew up in the P. T. Barnum public housing project in Bridgeport, Conn., adjacent to the city dump. The massive landfill essentially served as his childhood playground, and it came to have a profound, lasting impact on his art, inspiring both his use of materials and the narratives underlying his artwork. As described by Drew:

The city dump occupied every view of our apartment. I would watch the bulldozers troll back and forth over this massive landfill, the dump trucks cart and drop, and the cranes lift, deposit, and bury. I remember all of it, the seagulls, the summer smells, the underground fires that could not be put out … and over time I came to realize this place as “God’s mouth”… the beginning and the end … and the beginning again. As I grew up I always found myself there, mining through the remnants and throwaways, putting this with that.

For Drew the dump symbolized the cyclical process of birth, life, death, and regeneration, and this symbolic interpretation can be found in works throughout his artistic career. This narrative of decay and transformation is powerfully conveyed in Number 235, which evokes the aftermath of both natural and manmade disasters such as floods, forest fires, or tornados, and the debris and disruption left behind by human impact on the landscape.

Number 39S

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Drew’s visual language and processes reference a wide variety of art historical sources and influential artists. One can see an immediate, visceral connection between Drew’s work and Louise Nevelson’s mid-twentieth century assemblage constructions, like Black Zag CC (1964–77) hybrids of painting and sculpture in which ordinary materials, such as used wooden boxes and crates, are transformed into poetic abstractions. Learn more about Nevelson on NCMALearn.

Drew’s Number 39S, a rectangular, humanly scaled, highly evocative composition with a sliver of white that bisects the vertical plane like a zipper or vertebrae, employs an equally evocative language of abstraction.

Number 8

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Leonardo Drew

b. 1961, Tallahassee, Fla.; lives Brooklyn, N.Y.

Leonardo Drew has been an artist nearly his entire life, starting as a child when he filled countless sketchbooks with drawings of cartoons he copied from television shows. His artistic potential and extraordinary skill as a draftsman and illustrator were recognized early on, and he had his first solo exhibition at age thirteen in 1975, when he won a competition with a larger-than-life painting of Captain America.

While still in high school, Drew considered a career in graphic design and illustration, and he was scouted by Marvel Comics and DC Comics. But an encounter with an abstract Jackson Pollock painting—a black-and-white reproduction in a high school library book—changed his trajectory as an artist: “I saw Jackson Pollock’s work up against what I was doing. That itself was an epiphany. I began to realize that there’s something else beyond the surface.” Drew decided to move to New York to study art, graduating from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art with a BFA in 1985. The renowned abstract artist Jack Whitten (1939–2018) was one of his teachers and became a mentor who introduced him to numerous other African American artists, including Romare Bearden (1911–98), Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000), Mel Edwards (b. 1937), and David Hammons (b. 1943), among others. Whitten and these other artists had an enduring impact on Drew, allowing him to see himself as part of a much larger legacy, as an African American artist exploring abstract art and working outside of the mainstream.