Becomes the Weather

CATCH THE NEW YORK–BASED ARTIST’S EPIC INSTALLATION

NUMBER 235T ON VIEW AT THE CARTER.

BY DARRYL RATCLIFF

Looking at Leonardo Drew’s massive new installation Number 235T, at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, is like watching a symphony; it is hard to focus on every part at once, but the composition, which marches alongside the walls like sheet music, creates an irresistible rhythm that engages the viewer at all angles. The installation feels like hundreds of individual artworks assembled together to become a new whole.

There is an order to what Drew is doing. Although the individual parts of the installation may feel like jazz, everything is manipulated by Drew’s hand. If an object looks old, rusted, burned, burnished, found—that was all done in the studio. If a particular piece makes one think of childhood, or Katrina, or San Antonio—that too is intentional. Drew is interested in nature, in cycles of generation and regeneration, but through skillful manipulation he has harnessed those systems into the control of a singular artist. “I needed to be the weather,” Drew says.

This mythology—the artist becoming a force of nature—is palpable in the installation. Standing inside Drew’s installation feels like being in a spaceship made of hieroglyphics and capable of time travel. It is as if the artist has caught lightning again and again and presented it like a small offering to you. At any moment the installation could fall apart, but it never does. Every deviation makes the whole stronger, every new material, new technique, builds and reaches, until you are surrounded by Drew’s visual jazz.

Yet in spite of the epic scale of Drew’s vision, he also seems deeply concerned about human labor. In one larger section of the

All images here and opposite: Leonardo Drew (b. 1961), Number 235T (detail), 2023, mixed media, courtesy of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, © Leonardo Drew installation is an undulating shape like ribbon, with thousands of wooden spikes driven into it, one by one by hand. This is next to a spool of cotton muslin fabric with spiral geometric shapes woven into it, which then morphs into a less-structural installation of the same muslin. Drew declares that “a Black person working in cotton is inherently political,” but leaves it to the viewer to figure out its politics. There is a commitment to personal labor and craftsmanship, but under the context of freedom and in the guise of an artist.

In fact, this may also explain Drew’s commitment to abstraction, even though it was his love for comic books that drew him into the arts to begin with. “Abstraction is an endless possibility,” Drew says. He is concerned with building its language through his own practice and hopes that artists who consider his work use it as a way to expand abstraction further. And it almost doesn’t seem fair, the range that Drew has when it comes to abstraction. For example, there are grid-like colored assemblage paintings; nods to color field paintings; dark, moody, elegiac abstract expressionism; colorful mosaics that evoke both Mark Bradford and Anselm Kiefer; minimalist encaustics—and all of that is before one even considers the sculptural abstraction Drew is most known for.

The Amon Carter installation is the first in what Drew sees as a three-part exploration of his current practice . Part two of the series is his installation Number 360 in the chapel at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the UK, which is tonally darker and slightly less ordered than the Carter installation. He will cap off the series with a solo exhibition opening September 6 at Talley Dunn Gallery in Dallas that he previews as a “pixel explosion monstrosity.”

Drew’s Number 253T warrants multiple trips and significant time to contemplate the installation. One always picks up on something new, a breathtaking detail initially overlooked. It is generous, expansive, and sublime. It can transport and nourish you. It is the weather. P

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