At the center of James Drake’s seventeenth exhibition with the gallery, Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness is a monumental drawing on canvas crafted in the artist’s renowned, virtuosic style. The twelve by twenty-four-foot charcoal drawing and the exhibition share a title and both explore the themes and the borders surrounding chaos, desperation, and ultimately forgiveness.
During his forty-year artistic career, “James Drake has studied the theme of humanity in all of its triumphs, failures, and follies- including war and resistance; desire and sexuality; connection; alienation, and aspiration; greed, gluttony, and vanity. Drake has worked with equal fluency in video, photography, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, narrating the human story with an awareness of the greater cycles of history and a critical eye toward the social, political, and economic problems of contemporary society”. -Excerpt from the exhibition catalogue James Drake-Salon of a Thousand Souls, New Mexico Museum of Art, 2014.
Included in the exhibition is a collage of the artist’s source material and inspiration for Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness as well as collages of drawings. The artist is also exhibiting works derived from the monumental drawing which incorporate painting upon images of the drawing.
James Drake was born in Lubbock, TX in 1946. He received his BFA in 1969 and MFA in 1970 from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, CA. Drake has presented his figurative narrative art internationally and has received critical praise for his dramatic steel sculptures, drawings, and video installations. His vocabulary of images relates to art history, weaponry, the fine line between savagery and civilization, and life on the densely populated bilingual Juarez-El Paso border. His work is in the permanent collection of over 30 museums, including the Albright-Knox Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2007 his work was featured at the 52nd International Venice Biennale and in 2000 his work was included in the Whitney Biennial. Drake is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and a Nancy Graves Award for Visual Arts.
The exhibition Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness is concurrent with the artist’s residency at Ucross, a preeminent artist residency program on a historic 20,000-acre working cattle ranch in northern Wyoming. His new, multi-year collaborative project at Ucross is with acclaimed Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, award-winning Texas novelist, and poet Benjamin Sáenz, and celebrated New York performance artist Shaun Leonardo. The live performance, inspired by Drake’s Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness, will premiere in 2023 in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Ucross.
