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“All those things [travels] were done back to back. One after the other. It was a realization that I could spend that much time out of the studio and not miss the studio, because life was going on and art was going on within me. The art is fed by experiences. Travelling and digesting things and allowing these things to influence your body.” — Leonardo Drew

For it being the Time of Quarantine, Leonardo Drew sure has been busy. After a run in the fall of 2019 at Madison Square Park, Drew’s massive outdoor installation City in the Grass was on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh through the spring and summer (closed September 7, 2020), while his exhibition Making Chaos Legible opened (belatedly) on September 7 to run through January 3, 2021. You can see some great time lapse videos of the installations here and here.

Also recently (and belatedly) opened on August 27, 2020 is Leonardo Drew: Cycles, From the Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation at the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University Bloomington. And now opening tomorrow, Saturday, September 26, 2020 at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson is the latest installation of City in the Grass.

Leonardo Drew is represented by Galerie Lelong who featured him in a dynamite solo show in 2019, and he was also featured more recently in a great Zoom conversation with gallery director Mary Sabbatino, which you can see here.

We hope that after all this, Drew has an opportunity to rest… and maybe do some travelling. In this video from season 7 of Art21, Drew discusses the importance of travel in relationship to his artwork. Be sure to catch the new, tenth season of Art in the Twenty-First Century from Art21 here.

From Art21:

Leonardo Drew discusses the importance of travel in relationship to his artwork. “If you allow your antennas to reach out,” he tells a group of students at Vigo Gallery in London, “you’ll find what it is you need for this part of your journey.”

Deeply devoted to his studio practice, Drew was initially reluctant to leave his home base in New York for an extended period of time. But back-to-back trips to Peru, Cuba, Spain, and Switzerland led him to a realization: “I could spend that much time out of the studio and not miss the studio because life was going on and art was going on within me,” he explains. “The art is fed by experiences.”