“Drawing is so beautiful because it’s a medium that reaches far beyond fine art or contemporary art,” says Rosario Güiraldes, The Drawing Center’s associate curator. “It’s democratic. It’s universal. It’s accessible. We’ve all done it at some point in our lives, so it breaks out and participates in the world at large, beyond a kind of art historical context.”
As a contemporary curator of a medium-centric institution—she’s been at The Drawing Center since 2017—Güiraldes finds the lens anchors her in a flood of cultural chaos and information. An Argentinian based in New York, she spent the last two-and-a-half years curating two recent shows at The Drawing Center. “Fernanda Laguna: The Path of the Heart” (2022) was a sweeping survey of the Argentine artist—still sousradar internationally—and a personal one for Güiraldes. “The artist was one of my earliest experiences at 16 or 17 when I still didn’t even know that I wanted to pursue a career in the arts,” she says. “I take very seriously the kind of responsibility and agency that curators have, being in the position where you can open doors for someone, invite them to be part of the conversation or build a bridge, in this case with Argentina and the global south where I’m from.”
After two years of social distancing and isolation, drawing has never felt as timely or as raw. This spring, “Drawing in the Continuous Present,” comprises nearly a hundred works on paper by 13 artists across ten countries. The selections explore the primacy and possibilities of drawing throughout the pandemic. “Most of the artists in this show are also very good painters or sculptors, in addition to being incredible draftspeople,” Güiraldes says. “But drawing has had this historically contentious relationship with art history. In my conversations, I tend to talk about drawing as the middle child of mediums. I had a very visceral need to reassert why I’m working in the contemporary art field. Why drawing? The experience of the past two years gave me an intuitive sense of why the immediacy of drawing is so relevant right now.”
