Line in the Sand

Throughout her later years, Ana Mendieta embarked on her “Silueta” series. To do so, the Cuban-American artist recorded her body by outlining it in the land, and sometimes demarcated its image with flowers or soil, other times blood or fire. The latter, depicted in a video titled Alma, Silueta en Fuego, 1975, in which a figure is engulfed in flames, is included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s final show of the summer, which brings together 11 artists from its collection across various mediums to explore the subliminal power of drawing and its relation to the body.

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Process is paramount to the works featured in “What It Becomes,” which range from photo to video to performance to works on paper. The method involved, in each case, hinges on drawing. Each artist uses this essential, often preliminary, stage to both transcend and record their physical form. Wendy Red Star annotates found images of Indigenous leaders. While some, such as Mendieta, use their body’s to shape their work, others, like Catherine Opie in Self-Portrait/Cutting, 1993, employ it as a canvas. 

Each work on view in the Manhattan museum explores the medium’s ability to probe the unknown and excavate new ideas about what it means to inhabit a body, an identity, and all the relationships that come in tow. The show’s chief interest lies in what the process of drawing yields, inspired by Nigerian-American visual artist Toyin Ojih Odutola’s words: “What it becomes is what I’m interested in,” she said to Interview Magazine in 2015 on her portraiture, “I’ve always felt the portrait is an occasion for marks to happen.”

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Many in this group use drawing to expand into different mediums—and parts of themself. Naotaka Hiro’s work, Untitled (5432112345), 2018, is guided by an interest in the corporeal. A girl in a yellow dress with impossibly long fingers sits and looks into the distance with headphones over her ears. Chaos reigns around her. Stars fall from the sky, faces bloom out of nowhere, darkness prevails, but her impossibly long fingers stretch up and over her frame like armor. Here, the Japanese artist uses drawing to imagine a safeguard over the body, provided by the mind. His process is drastic; he often draws for hours in extreme positions. Then, the artist records the way his body moves when it's restrained to explore his mutation, and thereby his fascination: the unknowable nature of one’s own body.

Elsewhere is Darrel Ellis’ haunting Self-Portrait after photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, created in 1989, the same year Mapplethorpe died of AIDS. Ellis’ ink-and-brush drawing is a response to a portrait Mapplethorpe took of him seven years prior. In the work, Ellis’ arm is drawn over his bare chest, and with one hand he cradles the other’s knuckles. He looks on with glossy eyes and a steady, somber acceptance, as if he is realizing both the absence of his friend’s body and the horrifying reality of a disease that would take his life three years later. 

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In pursuit of drawing’s mutative power, Curatorial Fellow Scott Hutchinson brings together a group of artists who push the medium further with their whole bodies and personal histories to achieve a kind of boundlessness. Physical forms are abandoned and reimagined as a site of discovery, transcendence, and correction. Where does the body begin and end? For some, it’s a line in the sand.

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"What It Becomes" is on from August 24, 2024 to January 12, 2025 at view at the Whitney Museum at 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY 10014.