Sketching Wide Boundaries for Drawing

‘There are things you can experience with a drawing that you can’t find in any other kind of work, but it’s an art-making practice that continually falls in and out of favor,” says Connie Butler, MOCA’s newly appointed curator of works on paper.

“I was recently looking at the catalog from a 1976 show called ‘Drawing Now’ curated by Bernice Rose [of the Museum of Modern Art], and she makes the point that drawing has always been considered a secondary medium because it’s been seen as preparation for larger work,” continues Butler, whose first curatorial project for MOCA--”The Power of Suggestion”--opens today.

“However, contrary to what you might think, it’s not a matter of scale that’s led to drawing being dismissed as a lesser art form,” Butler adds. “Rather, it’s a matter of finish, and it wasn’t until Modernism, which put a high premium on experimentation and lack of finish, that drawing ascended to a more equal position. The definition of drawing started to really open up in the late ‘50s with works being made at the time by artists like Robert Raushenberg, and what constitutes a drawing today has become extremely open-ended.”

That belief is central to “The Power of Suggestion,” which features works by 13 young artists who challenge the parameters of drawing in various ways.

“With this first show, I wanted to map out a wide territory for drawing,” explains Butler, 33. “Toward that end, the show includes work by Meg Cranston and Pauline Stella Sanchez that employs aspects of performance art, an automated sculpture by Martin Kersels that could be described as a drawing machine in that it involves iron filings being dragged around on a piece of paper, and a work by Paula Hayes that’s in the earthworks tradition. Hayes supports herself working as a landscaper and she’s begun incorporating that in her art; at MOCA she plans to create a metaphorical space alluding to the fecundity of the fall season, using leaves gathered in Vermont.

“Sowon Kwon makes blueprint drawings about the bodily experience of architecture that use tracings of an idealized female form superimposed onto renderings of fragments of historically loaded architectural spaces--obviously, this isn’t going to look like a traditional drawing show,” she says, laughing.

As MOCA’s first works-on-paper curator, Butler needn’t concern herself with maintaining any established tradition, and she looks forward to inventing it as she goes along.

“The impetus for this new area of development is Marcia Weisman’s collection of 83 works on paper, which was given to MOCA early this year and is the backbone of this new focus area,” Butler says of the portion of the L.A. art patron’s holdings that came to MOCA after Weisman died in 1991.

“The Weisman gift includes several historically important drawings, among them a Jackson Pollock surrealist collage from 1943, Willem de Kooning’s 1952 pastel, ‘Two Women With Still Life,’ works by Philip Guston, Arshile Gorky, Agnes Martin and Clyfford Still, 10 drawings dating from 1957-86 by Jasper Johns, and five works by Ed Ruscha.

“MOCA’s works on paper collection includes drawings, graphic works, prints, collages and photographs, and the remainder is composed of 73 drawings acquired from various sources, 15 Joseph Cornell collages [a recent gift from the Cornell Foundation], 169 prints and 2,564 photographs, the bulk of which are in the Freidus Collection of 2,100 images [a purchase of portfolios by 11 post-war American documentary photographers, acquired last year from New York collector Robert Freidus].

“Thus far, these works haven’t been separated out from MOCA’s collection as a whole, and the plan is to bring them together and create a study center slated to open next year, where people can make an appointment to see any work on paper they’re interested in. Most of our conservation work will be done off site, but we will have a small library and also plan to devote gallery space in a fairly consistent way to works on paper, so I’ll regularly be curating small shows from the collection.

“MOCA’s curators don’t confine themselves to one particular medium, so the curatorial staff will continue to draw from the works on paper collection, and I’ll be free to wander into other media if it suits the needs of a show I’m working on,” she adds.

“At the moment, I’m working with [MOCA curator] Kerry Brougher on a show drawn from the permanent collection that will take a revisionist look at color field and hard-edge painting, an exhibition organized by Klaus Ottman of Polaroids by the late Mark Morrisroe, which opens next summer, and a few other shows it would be premature to talk about.”

Born in 1963 and raised in L.A., Butler grew up with an exposure to art. “My mother owned an independent bookstore in Santa Monica [Pacific Bookstore] and my father was a TV director, so they exposed me to many different creative traditions,” says Butler, who lives with artist David Schafer in the mid-Wilshire district. “They took me to museums and sent me to summer art classes at LACMA, so I and my younger brother, who’s a video documentarian, always had a relationship with visual things.”

Enrolling in 1984 at Scripps College, where she earned a bachelor’s in art history, Butler recalls, “my major included a museum studies class that involved an internship under Julia Brown Turrell and Kerry Brougher at MOCA, shortly after it opened. I discovered I loved working with artists and being close to the process, and enjoyed the teamwork that’s part of working in a museum, as opposed to the isolation that’s often part of being an art historian.”

After her MOCA internship, Butler attended graduate school at UC Berkeley from 1985-87, then worked as a curator for two years at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa. That led to a curating post from 1989-92 at New York’s Artist’s Space--a job she says “politicized me in a way I hadn’t been before.”

“I consider myself a feminist, and though I don’t plan to only do shows about women, we still have a lot of catching up to do in every field. As is true of almost every collection in every museum, women are underrepresented in MOCA’s works-on-paper collection, and there are several key women artists--Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, Yayoi Kusama, Eva Hesse--who I feel it essential be included in this collection.

“That will be one of my goals in terms of how I hope to help develop the collection, and I also feel it needs fleshing out in its representation of artists of color. Again, this isn’t a MOCA problem--it’s just symptomatic of how history has been written thus far, and artists of color have been given short shrift in most institutional collections,” adds Butler, who also worked at New York’s Neuberger Museum of Art from 1992 to ’95.

“These issues are in the process of being rectified because everyone’s consciousness is different than it was 10 years ago,” she concludes. “We know now there isn’t just one history, that many histories unfold simultaneously, and you can’t rely on just one source of information. So where do you get your information? How do you know it’s reliable? These are huge questions curators must be acutely aware of, because curators have the power to bring in other voices and occasionally, to rewrite history.”

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“THE POWER OF SUGGESTION,” MOCA at California Plaza, 250 S. Grand Ave. Dates: Opens today. Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Ends Jan. 26. Prices: Adults, $6; senior citizens 65 and older and students with ID, $4; children under 12, free. Phone: (213) 626-6222.