Drafts

Participating artists: Zoe Beloff, Kamau Amu Patton, Mark Sussman, Erica Baum, Lauren Bakst, Shonni Enelow, Steven Zultanski, Nikolas Gansterer, Avi Alpert, Danny Snelson, Mashinka Firunts, Cally Spooner, Craig Dworkin, Lanny Jordan Jackson, Benjamin Tiven, Penelope Umbrico

In 2013 I curated Drafts, a programming series at The Drawing Center in collaboration with the Reanimation Library.

A draft—as a preliminary sketch, an embryonic form subject to revision, a current of moving air—provided a model for the series. Drawing on the collaborative energy and associative thinking of the Surrealist exercise cadavre exquis, the programs of Drafts unfolded in a participant-driven evolution. An initial series of nine images culled from the Reanimation Library's collection mutated over the course of the series, as multiple curators and artists took turns at revision, extracting an image from the preceding set and re-contextualizing it among other images. Each resulting set formed the basis for a program in which assorted artists, writers, and other cultural producers responded.