This Menil Series Proves Drawing Is a Serious Art Form

Ronnie Quevedo’s C A R A A C A R A is the latest entry in the Menil Wall Drawing Series, and will be on display until August 31.

The Menil Drawing Institute occupies a unique niche in Houston’s visual arts scene. Its explicit role revolves around promoting drawing and illustration as media worth displaying and studying in and of themselves, not precursors to the paintings or sculptures more associated with the gallery world. Founded in 2008, the institute eventually moved into a separate building on the Menil campus in 2018, adjacent from the Cy Twombly Gallery, appropriately enough.

As is custom, the gallery featured wide stretches of bone white walls suitable for displaying priceless works. However, the institute’s staff also saw in these blank swaths a potential canvas. They devised of the Menil Wall Drawing Series, a rotating exhibition that invites artists to use one of the largest walls inside the space as an outlet for their own creative visions. Six artists have participated in the series so far: Roni Horn, Jorinde Voigt, Marcia Kure, Mel Bochner, Marc Bauer, and Ronny Quevedo, whose triptych mural C A R A A C A R A is currently on display until August 31.

With the challenging premise of its very structure—murals are, after all, often thought of more as outdoor public art than the domain of formal indoor shows—and promotion of drawing and illustration as valuable media, the Wall Drawing Series makes for yet another way the Menil Collection continues its message of appreciating art beyond the norm.

“The founders of the museum [John and Dominique de Menil] were strong drawing collectors. It was an important part of how they supported the artists that they cared about,” says Menil Drawing Institute assistant curator Kelly Montana. “Early in the years of this institution, it became very apparent how important drawings were to artists. And I think that vision to support artists is the kernel of how a program in a building like this came about.”

A modern white building at twilight. — The Menil Drawing Institute got its own building on the Menil campus in 2018.

The artists selected to take part in the series bring to the space such a unique spectrum of ideas and aesthetic sensibilities, it illustrates (pun intended) the infinite potential of a seemingly simple wall. Horn and Bochner went a more minimalist route. The former wrote a collection of clichéd phrases, while the latter left behind a scraping of blue carpenter’s chalk, titled Smudge. Voigt, Kure, Bauer, and Quevedo opted to fill all of the 36 feet made available to them with vibrant mélanges of color and line and movement. Bauer even returned to Houston from his Zurich home to add, subtract, and edit figures in his RESILIENCE, Drawing the Line as he got to learn more about the Bayou City’s queer communities and constant uphill battle against climate change.

“We do a number of studio visits every year to introduce ourselves and our program to who we think are artists working with drawing today that are working with it in really interesting ways… We really think about who will add a new perspective, add a new theme, add a new viewpoint to what’s come before,” Montana says. “We’re still in a phase of the program where we are really looking for someone to stretch the boundaries of what this program can be and really stretch the boundaries of what our audiences have seen before in this series.”

C A R A A C A R A undeniably fits this criteria. Quevedo’s contribution divides the space into three panels, each layered with overlapping cosmological charts, clothing patterns, and sports plays (mainly soccer and basketball). His mother was a seamstress, and his father was a professional athlete; the artist begins with these personal touchpoints to offer viewers ruminations on geographic and creative connections between North and South American peoples, material culture, and the self—all united under one starry sky.

“I’ve never worked at this scale. The idea was to take a technique or process I’m used to and scaling it up. I think [C A R A A C A R A] was very much a response to the site. I would say as soon as the invitation to commit to it started, that’s when the work conceptually started happening,” Quevedo says. “The physical aspects of it probably took a week to make the thing happen on site. But the concept and the ideas probably took over the course of the year.”

Each section of the triptych is distinguished from one another through the use of a dark blue wax transfer paper, which Quevedo’s mother would use in her sewing work. They run through a gradient from light patches to near opaque coverage. Depending on which part of the work one looks at, the wax either highlights or obscures the lines and patterns the artist carefully gouged into the wall using a CNC router machine.

“I’m really interested in how we map things in a topographical way, how we often kind of feel that topography can provide a container for a really abstract or really expansive space. I feel like conceptually, there’s something about our attempt to want to understand those things as a kind of search, either for self or a search for meaning,” Quevedo says. “For me, it’s personal, but also something that is shared by people. While we may not understand how a pattern can help you create a dress or a jacket, we understand what it’s like to step into that. We can understand how mapping has helped us create a sense of space, a sense of the world.”

Ronny Quevedo poses in front of C A R A A C A R A.

The Wall Drawing Series is located on the wall directly facing the other two galleries in the institute’s building. Whether subtle or not, this juxtaposition creates a dialogue between artists, often transcendent of time, location, and medium. C A R A A C A R A runs alongside the exhibitions Fragments of Memory (curated by Montana) and Out of Thin Air: Emerging Forms (curated by Kirsten Marples). As with Quevedo’s piece, the works in Fragments of Memory fit together mental puzzles and simple, deconstructed forms—Jim Love’s series of untitled letter templates are particular standouts here—to bridge the personal with the collective.

Meanwhile, the artists presented in Out of Thin Air all preoccupy themselves with lines, whether created by hand or randomly via placing paper near smoke. Lines are the most fundamental basic of drawing and illustration, yet deceptive in their mundanity. They can, quite literally, be anything they please, saying anything they desire. And it’s lines that find commonalities between athletics, textiles, and the stars in C A R A A C A R A.

“We really try to have a spread of offerings available. Once it’s all together, you see these wonderful correspondences,” Montana says. “I think that’s so similar to how Ronnie had to work on the Wall Drawing, thinking about the relationship between the micro and the macro and the place of your body in between those scales. It’s a fun game that we all get to play after everything’s on the wall.”

Yet like gallery shows themselves, the Wall Drawing Series is an ephemeral experience, with the added bittersweetness that the art won’t return to storage, private collections, or other museums and galleries. It will need to be wiped clean to leave the space blank for the next artist to come through and fully realize their own vision, one that builds on the message that drawing and illustration are hardly trifling.

“I gained a really beautiful way to think about this from our last artist, Mark Bauer. He talked about these works as being more like events as opposed to objects or things,” Montana says. “I thought that was a really beautiful way to think about it, almost the way you would go to a concert, and you go and it’s at a particular time, and you need to be present, and you need to show up for it, and then that concert will never happen in the same way ever again.”

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This Menil Series Proves Drawing Is a Serious Art Form

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