Sara Reisman – interview: ‘This was an opportunity to engage with contemporary issues that interest our members and to work with artists and architects from the larger art community’

Sara Reisman, chief curator at the National Academy of Design, talks about the institution’s 200-year history and its aims for the future, and picks out some favourites from its current show, Drawing as Practice

Installation view, Drawing as Practice, National Academy of Design, New York, 2023. Photo: © Etienne Frossard. Courtesy of National Academy of Design.

by LILLY WEI

The following is an edited and excerpted conversation with Sara Reisman, who organised the National Academy of Design’s current show, Drawing as Practice, with associate curator Natalia Viera Salgado. The exhibition includes works by members and invited non-Academicians.

Lilly Wei: Before we discuss Drawing as Practice, the very ambitious, wide-ranging exhibition that launched your new location in Chelsea, could you give us a brief overview of the National Academy of Design’s illustrious history?

Sara Reisman: The National Academy of Design was established in 1825 by a group of 30 artists and architects. We are the oldest artist and architect-led institution in the country and will be celebrating our 200th anniversary soon. When it was founded, the “design” in its name meant painting, drawing, sculpture, engraving and architecture and its mission was to promote fine arts through instruction and exhibitions.

LW: There are quite a few wonderful architectural drawings in the show. I don’t think I realised how many architects are National Academicians. I see that your current members include David Adjaye, Renzo Piano, Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, among many others.
 
SR: About 20% of our members are architects and, not intentionally, about 20% of the works on view in this show are by architects.

Installation view, Drawing as Practice, National Academy of Design, New York, 2023. Photo: © Etienne Frossard. Courtesy of National Academy of Design.

LW: You very recently moved to Chelsea from the Academy’s longtime Beaux-Arts mansion uptown?

SR: Yes. Our Chelsea location is the 14th in the Academy’s existence (there was a lot of moving around in the beginning) – and unusual for us since it is now surrounded by contemporary galleries and art institutions, unlike the uptown location it was so closely identified with for more than a century, which was surrounded by museums – the Guggenheim, Cooper Hewitt, the Metropolitan and the others.

It is an honorary society limited to 450 living artists and architects; new Academicians are elected annually by its current members. The National Academicians believe that art and architecture can be transformative, the mission continues to be focused on education despite the closing of its museum and school a few years ago because it was no longer financially sustainable. While we will continue to have exhibitions and to allocate grants and awards, we are also looking for new ways to support artists and architects. The National Academy’s collection is based on what we call “diploma works”, donations by our members that are representative of their practice.

LW: The show is an overview, a biography of sorts, of the National Academy?

SR: It’s a historic show, it’s our history, and it’s idiosyncratic. We began by looking at the collection, which has nearly 8,000 works acquired over the years, many of them on paper, and we tried to understand it, beginning with the figure studies and academic drawings of the early 19th century. We included some of the original casts that were used for figure studies, which were on loan, and had to be borrowed back. 

Installation view, Drawing as Practice, National Academy of Design, New York, 2023. Photo: © Etienne Frossard. Courtesy of National Academy of Design.

LW: You opted for a salon-style hanging?

SR: Yes, it was a reference to what the Academy usually did.

LW: It seems a lot of material and stories to organise. How did you thread the show together?

SR: We grouped the academic works that reflect the sensibilities of the founders near the entrance. Otherwise, we decided not to do it chronologically, thinking it would have more impact if the exhibition were divided into categories that would correspond to the changes within the National Academy in response to the changing art world. We came up with these groupings:  Instructional Drawings; Structures/Architecture; Plans and Proposals; Body/Portrait/Figure; Motion Studies/Automatic Drawing; Non-Traditional Drawing; Abstraction; Social Realism; and Social Commentary.

LW: It seems each category could also be an individual show. What were some of the reasons to include non-Academicians in the show? There are about 22 who are not members out of a total of 82 artists and architects.

SR: Over the years, the National Academy has sometimes been perceived as a club, as too insular, too enmeshed in the 19th century. This was an opportunity to shed that perception, to engage with contemporary issues that interest our members and to work with artists and architects from the larger art community.

Installation view, Drawing as Practice, National Academy of Design, New York, 2023. Photo: © Etienne Frossard. Courtesy of National Academy of Design.

LW:  At the gallery when we talked about the show, you said that you wanted to balance the Academy’s past while thinking about the role of the institution in the present.

SR: Yes, we are committed to what’s happening now because that will determine the National Academy’s future. For this show, we wanted to question the perception of what drawing is, and look more broadly at it, and we wanted a range of works so that there would be aesthetic, cultural and material diversity.

LW: How did you define drawing? It seems quite expansive.

SR: That was one of the most frequently asked questions about the exhibition. We talked through several definitions. One was drawing as a form of mark-making with tools that were conventional like a pencil or with a computer or drawing as a work on paper that is a one-off.  But we wondered what role technology will have in changing that? Since technology is always changing, so will the ways that drawing operates. We wanted to present a broad definition, so we defined it as works that involved drawing in the process of their making.

Left: Emilie Louise Gossiaux, True Love Will Find You in the End, 2021. Emilie Goussiaux, Sketchbook, 2022-23. Right: Alex Katz, Anastasia, n.d. Photo: © Etienne Frossard. Courtesy of National Academy of Design.

LW: What were some of the highlights in the show for you?

SR: There are many, but I’ll name a few I responded to for very different reasons. I found Emilie Louise Gossiaux’s drawing True Love Will Find You in the End (2021) very poignant. She’s blind and holding hands with her guide dog who is standing up as if human, drawing their bodies so both are part human, part animal to emphasise their interdependence. It’s next to an undated Alex Katz drawing, perhaps from 1984, of a young woman so faint that it looks like an afterimage, a dream, also quite poignant.

Avram Finkelstein, People’s Fountain, 2022, installation view, Drawing as Practice, National Academy of Design, New York, 2023. Photo: © Etienne Frossard. Courtesy of National Academy of Design.

There is Avram Finkelstein’s People’s Fountain (2022) overflowing with red dye in protest at the response of the US government to Aids. The Fleet’s In!, Paul Cadmus’s 1934 drawing of sailors carousing in Riverside Park in Manhattan was removed from an exhibition by the Works Progress Administration, which had funded it, because an admiral thought it was too licentious. But the real reason might have been because Cadmus was gay. The controversy, however, made him famous and he later thanked the admiral for the boost to his career.

The imagery in Anne Deleporte’s Lightning (2019) is the result of creasing and other incidents that occurred during printing and Liliana Porter’s black drips is also about the releasing of control, the gestures minimal, but emphatic, which I found particularly effective.

LW: What were some of the surprises for you, some unexpected connections in seeing the works together?

SR: Charles Gaines, who is a member and works with systems, music and political speech, and Clifford Owens, who isn’t a member and is a performance artist and writer whose drawings shown here focus on motion and the gestural, had unexpected correspondences. Also, the embroidered drawings of LJ Roberts, a textile artist, and Owens had a lot in common, which became clear in one of our Drawing Dialogues programmes in October. John Newman’s objects with their op art patterns and Joanne Greenbaum’s daily drawings of shapes also had unexpected correspondences when seen in proximity. Stephen Dean’s deconstructed dartboards and Robert Mangold’s looping frieze study might look dissimilar, but both read as forms of motion studies.

Installation view, Drawing as Practice, National Academy of Design, New York, 2023. Photo: © Etienne Frossard. Courtesy of National Academy of Design.

LW: The last room in the show is dedicated to social realism and social commentary, which you treat separately. Could you talk about that?

SR: We defined social realism as a methodology primarily used by printmakers and painters to draw attention to the sociopolitical conditions of the working class in the first half of the 20th century whereas social commentary addresses contemporary cultural and sociopolitical issues by rhetorical means. Shellyne Rodriguez and LJ Roberts present portraits of their respective Bronx and LGBTQ+ communities while Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation) uses text to focus on the issues of his community.

LW: Drawing seems to be of great interest recently, with quite a few exhibitions dedicated to artists’ drawings. Do you have any thoughts about that?

SR: If we’re talking about contemporary artists, they were probably more interested in drawing during the pandemic for pragmatic reasons, such as availability of materials or limitations of space. I’ve talked to artists who started doing drawings then and just continued to make them. From another point of view, audiences seem more interested in process, in being shown the concepts behind the work and how it comes about. There is the acknowledgment that things are not always resolved and there is a difference between intent and result. Among the works in Plans and Proposals are pictured several that were never realised, such as Jackie Ferrara’s Beacon Tower (2005) and Finkelstein’s fountain, but they were instructive, compelling in multiple other ways.

• Drawing as Practice, organised by Sara Reisman and Natalia Viera Salgado, is at the National Academy of Design, New York, until 16 December 2023.