Debra Bricker Balken wrote a marvelous, sensitive essay for the full-color 100-page catalogue we produced, which was paid for by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation and the Fifth Floor Foundation.

The show opened in the fall of 1999 at the Arnold and Sheila Aronson Gallery of Parsons School of Design in New York City, and traveled to Eastern Connecticut State University (January 2000) and the North Dakota Museum of Art [pictured above] (March 2000).

Though I curated rather than exhibited in this show, I was told on a number of occasions that it perfectly represented my sensibility. It certainly represents my attitudes about drawing. Here is my preface to the catalogue.

Curating Drawing in the Present Tense was a unique and wonderful experience. George Negroponte and I spent a year visiting every artist in their studio, looking through decades worth of work, discussing the nature of drawing with each. We talked about why we draw. We talked about how we draw. We discussed what's unusual about these particular drawings: how they differ from other so-called works on paper, why they so rarely leave the studio, why galleries are often ill-disposed towards featuring them, and how gratified we are to be able to have them seen. The result is an important show. These are drawings of a very special kind. They are the consequence of informal, highly personal, constantly re-invented, and necessary habits we all seem to share. Once made, we often forget them, but we always keep them. They inspire the use of adjectives such as pure, fresh, authentic, genuine. We encourage our students to think in this way. We now invite them, and the public, to see that we still do. I won't fuilly discuss my thoughts about drawing here except as they impacted on decisions about presentation. I will simply make the following observations; drawing is a means and its means is its goal. Drawing is thinking and thinking is not thoughts. Drawing is always a verb--even when used to name the thing drawn; it is perpetual action. Assuming that this is at all reasonable, how does one convey any of it? We've chosen a framework whereby the drawings might show themselves, unencumbered by any documentation or exegesis, like so many propositions in a boundless field of inquiry. Other than labels with the artists' names there are no titles, dates, sizes, mediums, explanations of what the drawings are for; no back, no front, no up, no down, no left, no right, no bios, no contexts, no history. They are images, they are objects, but most of all, they are alive. For the catalogue we chose to reproduce drawings that might show themselves through their actual size--thereby seeming to be held in your hands, to be looked at, again, without mediation. All in all, aside from the practical need for things such as frames and cases, we've tried to put very little between the viewer and the experience of these drawings. We hope that you'll visit this exhibition more than once and look long and carefully at every drawing. When you do you will see that they are not so much drawn, as drawing and redrawing themselves in an ever-present.