NEW YORK, NY.- The Morgan Library & Museum presents Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings, the first career spanning museum exhibition dedicated to the drawings of the acclaimed contemporary artist Lisa Yuskavage (b. 1962). On view from June 27, 2025, through January 4, 2026, the exhibition highlights more than three decades of Yuskavage’s intimate, inventive, and genre-defying works on paper.


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One of the most influential and original artists working today, Yuskavage is known for her charged portrayals of female subjects, infused with psychological depth, social commentary, and an enduring commitment to the history of painting. At once confrontational and meditative, her works blur the boundaries between high and low art, exploring traditional genres—the nude, portrait, landscape, and still life—with a contemporary eye to issues of female transgression and empowerment rooted in popular culture. In her own words, she is “interested in making art about how things are rather than how they should be.”


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“This is a special opportunity to share Lisa Yuskavage’s creative process with the public, continuing the Morgan’s tradition of exhibiting drawings by living artists,” said Colin B. Bailey, Katharine J. Rayner Director of the Morgan Library & Museum. “Yuskavage’s interest in the history of art spans many areas of the Morgan’s collections, from Renaissance color theory to Cubist painting.”

This exhibition reveals the centrality of drawing to Yuskavage’s practice. From early sketchbook pages to recent large-scale compositions, the presentation includes over forty works made from 1990 to the present in a wide range of media—graphite, watercolor, pastel, Conté crayon, distemper, gouache, ink on paper, and more. Regardless of the project, Yuskavage allows her materials to be her guide. Her career long inquiry into process and material experimentation has yielded entirely new ways of seeing and comprehending the world.

“Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings shows visitors how the artist develops her characters, compositions, and use of color across media,” said Claire Gilman, the Morgan’s Acquavella Curator and Department Head of Modern and Contemporary Drawings. “Her drawings reveal a deep and ongoing engagement not just with historical painting genres but also with historic examples of the artistic process, seen through her investigations into models, sculpted maquettes, and the artist’s studio.”

Highlights of the exhibition include the Tit Heaven (1991–93) watercolor series, created while Yuskavage was teaching herself the medium; drawings for the provocative Bad Babies (1991–92), a series of paintings that confront desire and shame; and drawings from her Bad Habits (1996–98) series, in which she interrogates the role of the model and reinvents historical tropes through the inclusion of sculpted props, friends, and invented characters. The exhibition concludes with Yuskavage directing her attention to another classic art historical genre: the artist’s studio, seen through a series of drawings filled with references to the studios of artists she admires (2019–23).

In the fall, the Morgan offers a rare and provocative dialogue between this exhibition and Renoir Drawings, a career-spanning survey of the drawings of Auguste Renoir (1841–1919). Working a century apart, both artists’ drawings are less widely known and share enduring fascination with the female form and the aesthetics of desire. Like her, Renoir came from modest origins and, according to Yuskavage, elevated “low imagery” to “high art.”



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