CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- This fall, the Harvard Art Museums present an exhibition that demonstrates how simple tools like chalk, crayon, graphite, and charcoal can be powerful vehicles for artistic expression. Sketch, Shade, Smudge: Drawing from Gray to Black showcases around 120 captivating European and American drawings from the 19th to 21st century that highlight the versatility of these media. An array of figural, landscape, still-life, and abstract drawings are on display, drawn primarily from the Harvard Art Museums’ important holdings of drawings. From highly polished portrait and landscape drawings, to quickly drawn figural sketches for studio practice, to large-format contemporary abstract compositions, the exhibition also provides a rare opportunity to view these works because of their light-sensitive nature. Examples of historical artist materials, primarily from the collection of the museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, complement the display. The exhibition is on view September 12, 2025 through January 18, 2026, in the Special Exhibitions Gallery on Level 3 at the museums. A robust lineup of public programs will bring the exhibition to life for a range of visitors, including lectures, in-gallery talks and tours, experimentations with drawing media in Materials Lab Workshops, and an open invitation to visitors to sketch with pencils in the galleries, including sessions with live models.

Chalk, crayon, graphite, and charcoal—each of these materials exhibits distinctive properties. Charcoal can be intensely rich and velvety, or delicately gray and suggestive, while graphite is slippery, shiny, and easy to erase. Crayon is deeply black and waxy, whereas chalk can be crumbly and diffuse. The creative manipulations of these media—such as smudging, scraping, and erasing—make them versatile tools for adding intensity, depth, precision, and expression to an artist’s vision. The exhibition presents drawings that make use of these materials and also demonstrates the various possibilities of material manipulation by artists who pushed their use of drawing media in new directions. The light-sensitive nature of these works on paper means they can be on public display only for a short period. The majority of the works are from the collections of the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger Museums, with a handful of loans provided by private collectors and Harvard’s Houghton Library and the Mineralogical and Geological Museum at Harvard.

Sketch, Shade, Smudge is curated by Penley Knipe, Philip and Lynn Straus Senior Conservator of Works of Art on Paper and Head of the Paper Lab, Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Harvard Art Museums; and Miriam Stewart, Curator of the Collection, Division of European and American Art.

“As a curator and a conservator, we have worked together for many years and are fortunate to have had the chance to examine thousands of drawings,” said Miriam Stewart. “Curators are charged with, among other things, selecting objects for various installations and exhibitions that tell particular stories.”

Penley Knipe continued: “Conservators are concerned with the physical care of works of art and, to that end, we focus on a deep material understanding of those artworks. Together, Miriam and I have spent countless hours trying to identify the specific tools and techniques used to create the drawings in the Harvard Art Museums’ collection.”

The entrance to the exhibition features a small selection of outstanding drawings that introduce the range of what can be accomplished with chalk, crayon, graphite, and charcoal. This space opens up to a second gallery that expands on the unique properties and possibilities afforded by each material, with sections dedicated to examples of drawings in each medium that showcase an astonishing range of creativity. Four display cases in this room highlight historical artists’ materials with examples of each of the drawing media, including crayons and pencils used by Barnett Newman and a box of charcoal owned by John Singer Sargent.

Highlights in these galleries include a large-format charcoal and chalk landscape, Farmstead (1906–7) by Piet Mondrian; a recent acquisition of an intimate charcoal and crayon drawing by John Wilson of his mother titled Violet (1971); Edgar Degas’s After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself (c. 1893–98), a large charcoal drawing executed on delicate tracing paper; Odilon Redon’s moody symbolist Chimera (1880–95) in charcoal and crayon; Georges Seurat’s Woman Seated by an Easel (c. 1884–88), a work in soft conte crayon that achieves a look equivalent to the artist’s pointillist paintings; Charles Sheeler’s photorealistic conte crayon drawing of his cat, Duke, in Feline Felicity (1934); Lee Bontecou’s Untitled (1970), a delicately drawn imaginative form in graphite that evokes a flower and a gasmask, a common subject in her work; Marc Brandenburg’s Untitled (2019), a sensitive graphite rendering of an unhoused person; and Toyin Ojih Odutola’s The Trap Vowel (2020), which depicts two figures drawn with rich strokes of graphite on Dura-Lar, a clear, stable film with a smooth surface.

The second half of the exhibition is dedicated to exploring the various inventive ways that artists manipulate the materials sketched on the page, and is laid out in sections dedicated to scrape, lift, edge, shade, smudge, refine, and gesture. Highlights here include two drawings by John Singer Sargent that utilized charcoal with erasing and smudging to render subjects engulfed with billowing drapery; Portrait of Madame Charles Hayard and Her Daughter Caroline (1815), a delicate graphite drawing by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres that shows some erasures; works in charcoal by Bauhaus-connected artists Lyonel Feininger and Walter Gropius that utilized smudging to create landscapes; an energetic drawing by Max Beckmann, Seated Woman Shading Her Face (1949) that was done in crayon and possibly charcoal; an untitled drawing from 1997 by Chuck Holtzman in which he used an electric sander to “carve” into the paper and scrape away charcoal; Jasper Johns’s Gray Alphabets (1960), created with a semi-transparent graphite wash; and many more. Rarely seen personal sketchbooks owned by Sargent, Edward Burne-Jones, Benjamin Champney, James Castle, George Grosz, Mel Pekarsky, and Dimitri Hadzi are also on display.

The final section of the exhibition is dedicated to the act of sketching. Visitors are invited to sit and take a moment to sketch using various prompts to copy a drawing or sketch a figural sculpture on display; free paper, clipboards, and pencils will be provided. A wall of sketches of figure and animal studies, landscapes, and still lifes, flanked by large figural bronze sculptures by Georg Kolbe and Auguste Rodin, provide inspiration. Beginner and advanced sketching sessions with an instructor and a live model will be held throughout the run of the exhibition, between October and December (dates and times TBA).

Said Stewart: “We invite visitors to look closely at the works on display, question our descriptions, and examine these artists’ graphic choices—perhaps even by picking up a pencil to sketch something of your own.”