JAMES DRAKE: Tongue-Cut Sparrows
August 30 - September 28, 2024
In stark black and white, a woman stands with one hand folded purposely over another. Another woman, face dappled in shadow, looks upward with longing at something we, as viewers, cannot see. A flock of ghostly black sparrows are ringed by an elaborate, old-fashioned frame design. Elsewhere hands flex and flare into a gesture of wings.
Photographs. Drawings. Video. Text. James Drake’s Tongue-Cut Sparrows is a massive undertaking, bringing together an astonishing range of arts media, created and developed over the course of 30 years (and still ongoing). As with so much of Drake’s work, this series has its origins in the borderlands of El Paso, where he lived and worked for decades. The project was sparked in 1994 by curiosity over witnessing a group of people (mostly women) gathered outside of the El Paso County Jail, moving, gesturing, and signing up toward the prison. He asked a friend about what was happening and discovered that these were family, friends, and lovers of prisoners, using an invented language of signs and gestures to communicate to their loved ones over distance, and without having to submit to the timetables, strictures, limitations, and scrutiny of official prison visits.
He was able to negotiate an introduction to the group, and slowly gain their trust. Drake has an amazing ability (as witnessed in other of his ongoing projects) to connect and enter into the cultural context of another, to investigate and find common ground. As an artist, he found his subjects were often more willing to let him in and share with him – curious about his work and perspective. Over the course of two years, Drake met with members of this community, asking questions, learning about the language, taking photos and video, and eventually collaborating with them. While the usual communications that these women make are about ordinary sorts of subjects, (How are the kids? When is my lawyer coming? I miss you. I love you.), Drake asked them if they’d be willing to translate and sign texts by famous authors. Drake brought in many favorites, from Shakespeare, Lorca and Machado to contemporary authors like Cormac McCarthy and Jimmy Santiago Baca. The subjects chose works that resonated with them, often in Spanish and English versions. Drake captured some of these gestural performances on video.
The title of the project originally comes from a Japanese folktale in which a sparrow is rescued and befriended by an older couple. A jealous woman cuts the tongue of the sparrow, leaving it injured, unable to speak, and forced back into the woodland. The old man eventually finds his sparrow friend along with a whole community of magical sparrows, who are so grateful for his intervention that they offer him a reward for his kindness.
There is a Hokusai painting of the folktale, Shita-kiri Suzume (literally translated to Tongue-Cut Sparrow), showing an open-mouthed sparrow flying above a pair of sheers. Almost invisible is the tiny brown crescent of the sparrow’s tongue, floating between the two. To be “tongue-cut” is a violent and shocking image, a powerful metaphor for disenfranchisement and the prejudices and economics that so often silence individuals and communities. The ingenious and creative language developed by the group Drake encountered (and echoed by the existence of other groups all over the world, who sign in their own invented languages to loved ones in prison) is a remarkable response to silencing.
Through the years exhibitions of works from Tongue-Cut Sparrows have occurred all over the world, from the Venice Biennale in 2007 to the Albright Knox in 2011 and galleries in New York, Texas, and elsewhere. Following this exhibition at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art in Santa Fe, there are multiple more exhibitions planned, including for SITE Santa Fe in 2026 and a collaborative performance piece at Carnegie Hall in October of this year.
Drake’s unique and diverse assemblage of art (artifacts?), in many media, drops us into the middle of a dialogue, a story. We are in the position of the outsider – like a prison guard at the El Paso jail, or a random passerby on the sidewalk – witnessing a language for which we don’t have the knowledge of grammar or syntax, let alone vocabulary. With Drake’s work we are presented with a symbolic and metaphoric expression, articulating itself in multiple forms, numerous media, or perhaps more accurately – in multiple gestures. Painting, video, photography, poetry. Each is a part of a whole message: a love letter, a documentary, an essay of social anthropology, a novel. We are invited into this unknown, yet deeply human and familiar world, to translate for ourselves a deep and multifaceted story.
- Michaela Kahn, PhD
Tongue-Cut Sparrows (Desire is not Enough), 2009, charcoal on paper, series of 24 drawings, 36 x 52 inches each
Tongue-Cut Sparrows (Desire is not Enough), 2009, charcoal on paper, series of 24 drawings 36 x 52 inches each
JD029
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Tongue-Cut Sparrows X, 2018
charcoal on paper 71 x 52 in.
JD020
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Price on request
$38,000
Tongue-Cut Sparrows XI, 2018
charcoal on paper
71 x 52 in.
JD021
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Tongue-Cut Sparrows, 2023
graphite and charcoal on paper, 20 parts 14 x 10.75 in. each
JD030
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$38,000
$18,000 Dancing on the Sidewalk, 2018 charcoal on paper 55 x 47.5 in.
JD022
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Black Sparrows #2, 2023 charcoal on hand-cut paper 44 x 30 in.
JD028
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Tongue-Cut Sparrows (Inside), 1998 archival ink jet print 33 x 49 in.
JD031
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$6,500
$36,000
$5,500
Education:
MFA Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, California
BFA Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, California
Awards:
2011 Texas Medal for the Arts Award, Texas Cultural Trust Council, Austin, Texas
2004-05 U.S. Art Critics Association (AICA), Best Show in a Commercial Gallery Nationally, 2nd Place, “James Drake: City of Tells”, Betty Moody Gallery, Houston, Texas; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
2001 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, New York, New York Nancy Graves Award for Visual Arts, New York, New York
1989 Awards in the Visual Arts, Southeast Center for Contemporary Art, Winston- Salem, North Carolina National Endowment for the Arts Grant, National Endowment for the Arts Travel Fellowship, France
1988 Mid-America Arts Alliance, National Endowment for the Arts Grant, New York, New York
Recent Solo Exhibitions:
2024 Tongue-Cut Sparrows, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
The Heart Has Many Rivers (For Carmen), Drawings 1962-2023, Moody Gallery, Houston, TX
2022 Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness, Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans, LA
2021 Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness, Moody Gallery, Houston, TX
2018 Tongue-Cut Sparrows (Desire is not Enough), Moody Gallery, Houston, TX
Tongue-Cut Sparrows, Blanton Museum of Art, Film & Video Gallery, Austin, TX, Organized by Carter Foster
2016 Flocking Shoaling Swarming (Blue Kiss), Holly Johnson Gallery, Dallas, TX
Anatomy of Drawing and Space (Brain Trash), The El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX
Drawing, Reading and Counting, Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans, LA
2015 The Anatomy of Drawing and Space (Brain Trash), Chapters 4, 6 and 8, Lannan Foundation Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
2014 The Anatomy of Counting and Position, Moody Gallery, Houston, TX
Anatomy of Drawing and Space (Brain Trash), Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX
James Drake | Pages, New Drawings, James Kelly Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
Anatomy of Drawing and Space (Brain Trash), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA (traveling)
Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness, Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans, LA
2012 Red Drawings and White Cut-Outs, Moody Gallery, Houston, TX (book signing in conjunction with James Drake: Red Drawings & White Cut-Outs, published by Radius Books, Santa Fe, NM)
2011 Dancing in the Louvre, McKinney Avenue Contemporary, Dallas, TX
Salon of a Thousand Souls, New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM Red Drawings/White Cut-Outs, Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans, LA
2010 A Thousand Tongues Burn and Sing, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, TX (catalogue)
James Drake, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA
James Drake, Dwight Hackett Projects, Santa Fe, NM
When the Swan is in the Sky, Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans, LA
2009 White, Moody Gallery, Houston, TX
James Drake, El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX(book signing in conjunction with James Drake, published by University of Texas Press)
2008 James Drake, Moody Gallery, Houston, TX (book signing in conjunction with James Drake, published by University of Texas Press)
James Drake, Dwight Hackett Projects, Santa Fe, NM
2007 War in Heaven, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA
War in Heaven, Galveston Arts Center, TX
Border of Desire, Holly Johnson Gallery, Dallas, TX
The Rain of Huitzilopochtli, Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans, LA
Exit Juarez, Dwight Hackett Projects, Santa Fe, NM
2006 City of Tells, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Downtown, San Diego, CA
Towards the Pandemonium of the Sun, Moody Gallery, Houston, TX
Birds of Paqime, Adair Margo Gallery, El Paso, TX
2005 City of Tells, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL
City of Tells, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM
2004 City of Tells, With Signs Following, Moody Gallery, Houston, TX
City of Tells, Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans, LA
Selected Public And Permanent Collections:
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth, Richmond, Virginia
Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, Texas
Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas
Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York
The Henry Buhl Foundation, New York, New York
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas
El Paso County Courthouse, El Paso, Texas
El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas
Federal Reserve Board Art Gallery, Dallas, Texas
Federal Reserve Board Art Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Hallmark Cards Art Collection, Kansas City, Missouri
Historical Preservation Authority to commemorate the civil rights marches of 1963, Birmingham Civil Rights District, Kelly Ingram Park, Birmingham, Alabama
The John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation, Chicago, Illinois
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, Alabama
Museo de Arte e Historia, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (La Jolla), La Jolla, California
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana
New York Public Library, New York, New York
Pascagula County Library, Pascagula Mississippi
Phoenix Museum of Art, Phoenix, Arizona
San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, Texas
The Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Sioux City Art Center, Sioux City, Iowa
Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas
University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona
University Art Gallery, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico
University of Texas, El Paso, Texas
Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York
