D O R S K Y G A L L ER Y | Curatorial Programs is pleased to announce that Extravagant Drawing, curated byJudith Tolnick Champa will open on Sunday, February 6th from 2:00-5:00 P.M. and remain on view through April 10th.

Tolnick Champa explains in her essay: “The slipperiness of drawing, with its immediacy and sense of becoming, is an expressive quality that stimulates a broad stylistic swath of contemporary artists. Drawing is a liberating point of origin and point of return for many accomplished artists working in and across various media today…” In the present exhibition, there is a collective extravagance that unites the work of the nine distinctive artists shown: Natalie Alper, Tayo Heuser, Irene Lawrence, Masako Kamiya, Jill Moser, Jessica Deane Rosner, Fran Siegel, Sarah Walker and Heeseop Yoon.”

Drawing’s qualities – its directness of hand-made mark making, its closeness as an original object to artistic conception itself – engages and sustains the attention of innovative emerging and established artists and creates avid audiences. In part as a challenge to the omnipresent virtual domain, drawing has come to operate with renewed intentionality and vigor. It achieves this in the notably “expanded field” of physical/inter-disciplinary space, or by adhering quirkily to a lavish preciousness of touch. Tolnick Champa refers to these qualities – dynamically present within the current grouping of drawings – as “extravagance.”

Judith Tolnick Champa is an independent curator and critic. She serves on the Board of the New England Museum Association and is a member of ArtTable and International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art. With co-curator Viera Levitt, she has initiated planning for a first-ever Providence Biennial. She has served as director of the former Fine Arts Center Galleries at the University of Rhode Island, where she curated three galleries, including a dedicated photography space. She also served as the curator of the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University. Tolnick Champa has curated well over 50 solo and focused group exhibition.