Kelly Montana

E. M. (Buck) Schiwetz (1898–1984) could be called a “favorite son” among Texas artists working in the twentieth century. Schiwetz ranks among the state’s best-known early artists, having left behind an important body of iconic Texas imagery produced over a prodigious career spanning some seven decades. Educated as an architect at A&M College of Texas, he parlayed this training with natural acumen to become a consummate draftsman, prominent illustrator, and celebrated artist. In the mid-twentieth century, Schiwetz distinguished himself as an active participant in the rise of Texas art. As the Texas art scene experienced a period of dynamic growth and development, his artwork evolved across successive movements of Lone Star Impressionism, Regionalism, Modernism, and Expressionism. During his lifetime, the artwork of Buck Schiwetz arguably graced more publications than that of any other Texas artist. Featured in popular journals such as The Humble Way or published in the pioneering art books issued by academic presses at both the University of Texas and Texas A&M University, Schiwetz’s Texas imagery has long been employed to portray and celebrate Lone Star history and culture.The Artistic Legacy of Buck Schiwetz provides a long-overdue examination of this important Texas artist and his legacy: the first authoritative treatment of Schiwetz’s career as both fine artist and accomplished illustrator, and the first scholarly examination of his full body of work.

Television and video’s influence on drawing practices and the ways they inspired new modes of graphic expression in the twentieth century From the late 1950s to the 1980s, a period known as the network era, television reached its apex as a cultural force in the home, and portable video cameras became widely available. Examining how this new technology spurred artistic experimentation, this study considers the relationship between drawing and art made for the small screen of the domestic television set and early video cameras. These electronic screens entered artists’ studios for the first time and became a new source of imagery and a device that could be manipulated to generate entirely new kinds of drawing. An essay by Anna Lovatt looks at the ways in which early television and video images—captured, transmitted, and displayed through raster lines—inspired new possibilities for abstraction and expressing concepts of self-reflection and surveillance, while Kelly Montana explores artworks made by women who used the immediacy and familiarity of drawing to disrupt objectifying media representations of their gender by recording themselves drawing, often on their own bodies. This copiously illustrated volume features drawings, film stills, videos, and multimedia installations by more than twenty artists both well-known and heretofore obscure, and includes discussions of the televisual imagery that permeates works on paper by Walter de Maria, the ways artists such as Anna Bella Geiger and Dennis Oppenheim used video to capture performative acts of drawing, and how Nam June Paik and Howardena Pindell treated the screen as a site of inscription. Distributed for the Menil Collection Exhibition Schedule: The Menil Collection, Houston, TX (October 4, 2025–February 8, 2026)

An investigation of conceptual artist Hanne Darboven’s artistic practice and her highly personal mark-making as a form of marking time on paper Hanne Darboven (1941–2009) is best known for her immersive installations of individually framed sheets filled with written formulations and collaged images. Approaching Darboven’s life and work through the lens of drawing, this succinct survey is organized around three watershed moments in the artist’s practice. It begins with examples of Darboven’s Konstruction drawings—abstract works based in transversal and mirroring strategies—made during her two-year stay in New York in the late 1960s. The next section maps how Darboven adapted her drawing practice into formulas that calculate specific dates and durations into a single number, which the artist represented as anything from a series of calligraphic lines to a set of consecutively drawn boxes. The book concludes with a close look at Inventions that Have Changed Our World, an installation from 1996 that documents each day of the twentieth century according to Darboven’s formulas and assigns an inventor, ranging from Johannes Gutenberg to the Wright brothers, to represent each of the century’s ten decades. This engaging overview highlights how Darboven's work offers a deeply idiosyncratic accounting of art and life that challenges time as a linear and objective measure. Distributed for the Menil Collection Exhibition Schedule: The Menil Collection, Houston (October 29, 2023–February 11, 2024)

An exploration of Brice Marden’s draftsmanship and the catalytic role the medium of drawing plays in his larger oeuvre In 1979, Brice Marden (b. 1938) asked that his drawings be thought of “as spaces,” reflecting the idea that drawing is a medium that is much more than its two physical dimensions. Looking closely at six series of drawings that span nearly the entirety of Marden’s ongoing career, this luxuriously illustrated presentation features works spanning from 1975 to 2019, including the never-before-published Letters from Borobudur of 2010. In addition to rarely seen early monochrome works, three groups of 1979–80s drawings—Mirabelle Addenda, Shell, and Cold Mountain Studies—foreshadow the artist’s mature linear work and highlight the process of invention and permutation that occurs as Marden thinks and draws on paper. A concise overview of Marden’s drawing practice investigates the geographies and methods that inform his work, while an artist interview offers insight into how Marden uses the medium as a means of exploring the creation of spaces on drawing surfaces.