NEW YORK, NY.- A new exhibition of contemporary drawings from the Morgan’s collection asks, what can drawing do? For many artists, drawing represents an attitude of experimentation and open-endedness more than a devotion to specific materials or techniques. By Any Means: Contemporary Drawings from the Morgan presents twenty-four innovative works on paper, including many recent acquisitions, by artists such as John Cage, Sol LeWitt, Vera Molnar, Robert Rauschenberg, Betye Saar, Gavin Turk, and Jack Whitten.

Opening January 18, 2019, the show presents works from the 1950s to today by artists who have absorbed and built upon the legacy of their Cubist, Futurist, Dada, and Surrealist predecessors.

Drawing has traditionally been valued as an expression of the singular hand of the artist. But many of the works in this exhibition were not produced “by hand” in any conventional sense. Instead, these artists have pursued drawing by any means, whether by pouring, pressing, rolling, rubbing, folding, pasting, printing, plotting, or pushing. Embracing the contingencies of chance, they have worked in collaboration with cars, trains, gravity, sound, and time.

A few of the exhibition’s highlights include Betye Saar’s A Secretary to the Spirits (1975), which demonstrates the power of collage to communicate complex ideas; Stephen Vitiello’s Speaker Drawing (22.06) (2006), in which the artist sought to visualize sound; and Jack Whitten’s Dispersal 'A' #2 (1971), an early experiment by the artist in which he combined black pigment with an adhesive used in art conservation. Also notable are works by Frederick Hammersley and Vera Molnar, which are among the earliest drawings made with computers. “These drawings expand on a long, rich history of artistic experimentation, but offer their own playful and distinctive approaches,” said Colin B. Bailey, director of the museum. “By Any Means allows visitors to experience our evolving and growing collection of contemporary works. We are proud to present this multifaceted selection of innovative drawings, which provides an introduction to some of the most dynamic contemporary practices on paper.”

“Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, drawing has been one of the most fertile arenas of artistic experimentation,” said Rachel Federman, assistant curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings and the exhibition’s organizer. “By Any Means offers a focused look at a range of innovation that has occurred over the past sixty years.”