Artworks

Leonardo Drew

Number 264, 2020

Wood, paint, and cotton

34 x 37 x 7 inches (86.4 x 94 x 17.8 cm)

In this new work, Drew depicts an abstracted landscape of white and black squares, arranged in a formal checkerboard grid. The artist transforms raw material to articulate overlapping themes with emotional gravitas; the use of cotton is an immediate reference to the labor history of African-Americans in the US. At once monumental and intimate in scale, his work recalls post-Minimalist sculpture that alludes to America’s industrial past. Currently, Drew is the subject of three solo museum exhibitions at the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; and the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Bloomington, Indiana.