NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art presents Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, an exhibition of more than 300 works that will be the first comprehensive presentation of this collection, a donation of approximately 2,500 works on paper by more than 650 artists that entered the Museum’s collection in May 2005. Assembled over a two-year period and ranging from the 1930s to 2005 with a heavy focus on contemporary practice, the collection provides a unique panorama of the state of drawing today. The collection was formed by the Foundation’s sole trustee, Harvey S. Shipley Miller, who is also a MoMA Trustee, in consultation with Gary Garrels, who was MoMA's Chief Curator of Drawings and Curator of Painting and Sculpture from 2000 to 2005. Compass in Hand is organized by Christian Rattemeyer, The Harvey S. Shipley Miller Associate Curator of Drawings, with Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art.

This exhibition, the largest drawings exhibition ever mounted at MoMA, will survey the collection and show the various methods and materials within the styles of gestural and geometric abstraction, representation and figuration, and systems-based and conceptual drawings. Brought together are historical works by Lee Bontecou and Joseph Beuys, Minimalist and Conceptual works by Donald Judd and Hanne Darboven, detailed narrative drawings by Elizabeth Peyton and John Currin, collages by Amelie von Wulffen, Mona Hatoum, and Lucy McKenzie and Paulina Olowska, and large-scale installations by Nate Lowman and Ján Mančuška, to name just a few.