Of Mythic Worlds: Works from the Distant Past through the Present

Olivia Shao

With contributors

Elise Duryee-Browner

E. C. Feiss

Maya Hayda

Annie Ochmanek

Lauren O’Neill-Butler

Director’s Foreword

Laura Hoptman

The Drawing Center has a well-documented history of giving platform to an enormously broad range of artists whose visions shape the way we look at the world. Lesser known is our institution’s role in creating opportunities for the New York art community to experience the creativity of curators with extraordinary expertise and/or compelling views on culture and its role in our lives. For nearly fifty years, The Drawing Center has hosted exhibitions organized by curators, artists, art historians, and experts in fields ranging from fine art to tattoos, all in a quest to present drawing at its most contemporary and provocative. In the spirit of this tradition, The Drawing Center thanks Olivia Shao, the guest curator for Of Mythic Worlds, for bringing her singular vision to our galleries. We invited Shao, an independent curator based in New York and, periodically, Hong Kong, to curate a show not because we had a specific exhibition in mind but because we wanted to give this interesting and unique independent curatorial voice the opportunity to tell her truths through the lens of drawing. What she has come up with is a visual essay composed of approximately fifty works on paper by creators ranging from a Qing dynasty calligrapher to the contemporary artist Julia Phillips. The presentation includes works by artists like Georgia O’Keeffe and Jack Whitten, writers like Roland Barthes and Janet Malcolm, and even the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.

Each of the drawings in Of Mythic Worlds reflects its unique history, but each is also an expression of what Shao describes as a “universal pursuit to understand that which is outside of our objective, worldly experience.” Some works are spiritual in nature; others, outright religious. Still others are reflective of esoteric, even occult belief systems. All, though, describe their relationship to the inchoate with a wordless pictorialism, whether abstractly or symbolically.

Of Mythic Worlds maps a universe of belief systems connected and diverse at the same time. Though there is a narrative to the show, it turns out to be less of a tale and more of a visual picture of an attitude towards the art object. In this exhibition, works on paper have magical associations; they are portals to other dimensions— mental, spiritual, psycho-geographical, and otherwise. Arranged around the gallery as individual entities, the space surrounding each artwork gives them a precious, almost sacred quality. In these works, all marks are mandalas and all mandalas are abstract drawings. For a small exhibition, Of Mythic Worlds tackles enormous ideas and travels in time across a vast art historical and geographic landscape. It is a contemporary exhibition not only because it includes some works that have been created in the past five years but because its theme of searching for existential meaning—that which lies beyond our verbal capacity to describe it—is something that all of us have experienced in these challenging times.

The Drawing Center is grateful to Olivia Shao for bringing this provocative and beautiful show and its accompanying publication to The Drawing Center. Institutional and private lenders are thanked separately by the curator, but The Drawing Center reiterates its gratitude for the collegiality of lending institutions like The Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Shaker Museum in Chatham and New Lebanon, New York.

Lead financial support for Of Mythic Worlds has been provided by the Burger Collection, Hong Kong, and the TOY family, along with The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Generous funding is provided by the ADAA Foundation, the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Art, Lonti Ebers, and Gagosian. Additional support is provided by The Director’s Circle of The Drawing Center. We are grateful to all of these funders as their visions are ambitious, challenging, compassionate, and in every way equal to that of Olivia Shao, our extraordinary guest curator.