Curated Conversation: Drawing Inspiration

Is there ever a wrong way to display your art collection? What connections are you trying to reveal in the installation? In Drawn: From the Collection of Jack Shear, Jack Shear, photographer, curator and Executive Director of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, takes on an exploratory, free-flowing manner in which the forms, compositions and colors on the sheets respond to one another in a playful, non-traditional hang. Join Carter E. Foster, Blanton’s deputy director for curatorial affairs, and Christian Wurst, curatorial assistant, as they discuss Shear’s unconventional installation and remark on some of their favorite works in the exhibition.

About our Speakers

Carter E. Foster joined the Blanton in 2016 as Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Prints and Drawings. He organized the exhibition Form into Spirit: Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin, to mark the opening of Kelly’s landmark building, and he co-authored the recent monograph on it published by Radius Books. He also organized Expanding Abstraction: Pushing the Boundaries of Painting in the Americas, 1958–1983  and co-organized Drawn: From the Collection of Jack Shear. Prior to the Blanton, he was a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art for eleven years. He has written extensively about modern and contemporary art.

Christian Wurst is the Curatorial Assistant to the Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs. He co-curated Arte Sin Fronteras: Prints from the Self Help Graphics Studio (2019) with Florencia Bazzano, Assistant Curator, Latin American Art, and was the curator for Jeremy Blake:Winchester Trilogy (2019) and Line Form Color (2017). He also assisted Carter Foster, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs, with Expanding Abstraction: Pushing the Boundaries of Painting in the Americas, 1958–1983 (2020), Form into Spirit: Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin (2018) and the Austin website and catalogue (2019). Prior to joining the Blanton in 2016, Christian held research positions at Dominique Lévy Gallery in New York, the Menil Collection for the Jasper Johns Drawing Catalogue Raisonné (2018), and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, for their exhibition Abstract Expressionism (2016). He earned his master’s degree in modern & contemporary American art at the University of Florida.

Feature Image Credit: Installation view of Drawn: From the Collection of Jack Shear, March 27–August 22, 2021,Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin