Background
Leonardo Drew was born in 1961, in Tallahassee, Florida, United States, and grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, United States.
66 5th Ave, New York, NY 10011, United States
During the period from 1981 till 1982, Drew studied at Parsons School of Design in New York City.
30 Cooper Sq, New York, NY 10003, United States
In 1985, Leonardo received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Cooper Union.
Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States
Leonardo Drew in his studio, Brooklyn, New York City.
Leonardo Drew was born in 1961, in Tallahassee, Florida, United States, and grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, United States.
Leonardo's interest in art emerged in his childhood. When he was a kid, he often found himself at the city dump, mining through and creating works from discarded remnants, giving them new meaning.
At the age of thirteen, he exhibited his work for the first time. Then, he got inspired by the process-based work of post-war American and European artists and took a decision to focus on fine arts training. During the period from 1981 till 1982, Drew studied at Parsons School of Design in New York City. Then, the artist enrolled at Cooper Union, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1985.
In 1988, Drew found his artistic voice, when he was creating his important work, entitled "Number 8", which he believes begat everything, that followed. The work consists of wood, paper, rope, feathers, animal hides, dead birds and skeletal remains. In 1989, Leonardo exhibited this work for the first time at Kenkeleba House in New York City, where it was received as an aggressive assertion of an artistic identity, wrought from personal experience and cultural heritage.
At the beginning of the 1990's, the artist began to integrate the element of rust in his works. He produced it chemically in his studio and also got it from the pieces of scrap metal he had found in the streets of New York City.
In 1992, Drew held his first important solo exhibition at the Thread Waxing Space in New York City, where he showed numerous large-scale abstract sculptures, created with the help of various materials, such as wood, rust and cotton. The same year, Leonardo took part in the Senegal biennial.
At the time, when Leonardo was in Africa, he visited catacombs and dungeons, where Africans were kept before being shipped out to a life of enslavement. This experience had a big impact on his oeuvre. One of the works he created after returning from Africa was the work, entitled "Number 43". It represents the repetition of hundreds of closely packed rust-encrusted boxes, filled with rags and debris, referencing and symbolizing the horrid living conditions of the slave.
In 2009, Drew’s mid-career survey exhibition, "Existed: Leonardo Drew", debuted at the BlafferGallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston and traveled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina and the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
During his career, the artist had many other solo exhibitions, held at different places, including San Francisco Art Institute (1994), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (1995), Mary Boone Gallery, New York City (1998, 2001), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2000), Palazzo Delle Papesse, Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena, Italy (2006), Artpace, San Antonio, Texas (2010), Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York City (2012) and many others.
Also, he participated in several artist-in-residence programs, including those at Artpace in San Antonio and The Studio Museum of Harlem in New York City, among others.
Drew was commissioned for a new outdoor project for Madison Square Park in summer 2019, marking the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s 38th public commission and the artist’s first major public art project.
He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York City.
At once monumental and intimate in scale, Drew's work recalls post-Minimalist sculpture, that alludes to America’s industrial past. The artist transforms accumulations of raw materials, such as wood, scrap metal and cotton to articulate various overlapping themes with emotional gravitas: from the cyclical nature of life and decay to the erosion of time.
Quotations:
"There is the artwork, that you physically make, but there's also the journey, that happens on the inside."
"You know, that you don't have all the answers, and the unknown is the best place, where you would want to be as an artist, not knowing. That actually leads you to ask questions, and it continuously feeds itself."
"The more you touch something, the stronger it becomes."
"Soap, a cleaning product, can be made from decay."
"The fact is, art is alive. It's moving around. It's alive."
"If you imagine my studio floor, you can just keep picking it up and getting masterpieces."