Stephen Farthing : Drawn Words

Two exhibitions in thirty drawings that together introduce Native American Drawing on Paper.

A DRAWN COMPARATIVE  HISTORY:  European visual culture and the Tribal Nations 1805 - 1979.

This first exhibition provides a very brief introduction to 19th & 20th century Native American history, seen though European eyes. Fifteen drawings take us via the Oregon Trail to Ghost Dancing and the cover Esquire Magazine.

THE ELEMENTS of LEDGER DRAWING: a sense of  time, place and space on the Great Plains.

The second exhibition of fifteen drawings introduces Plains drawing on paper. These are drawings that were executed during the latter half of the 19th century by imprisoned people, with the expectation that their visual narratives would always have some oral support. They were in short – not made to speak for themselves.

Professor Stephen Farthing is the Rootstein Hopkins Chair of Drawing at the University of the Arts London, a Royal Academician where he is Honorary Curator of the Collections and an Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. He studied at Central Saint Martins (then St Martins School of Fine Art) and the Royal College of Art. From 1990–2000 he was the Ruskin Master of Drawing at the University of Oxford; from 2000–04 he was Director of the New York Academy of Art.

As a part of his activities as an artist he is currently writing Living Color for Yale University Press with Professor David Kastan and researching Leonardo: The Corpus with Professor Michael Farthing MD. His most recent one person show’s include Titian’s Ghosts, National Trust, Ham House, London 2014 and The Back Story was staged in November 2010 at the Royal Academy of Arts. His recent publications include: Derek Jarman, the sketchbooks, editor, Thames and Hudson, 2013, The Sketchbooks of Jocelyn Herbert, RA Publishing, 2010. His current research is into the relationship between the spoken word and drawing with a particular focus on drawings made by preliterate societies.

Exhibition opening: Wed 5th Oct, 5:30pm - 7:00pm

Exhibition dates: Wed 5th - Thur 13th Oct

Gallery Hours: Wed - Mon 12pm - 5pm during exhibitions

Closed Tuesdays and Public Holidays