James Drake

His work has been featured in exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Venice Biennale, and the Whitney Biennial. Drake has received several awards, including Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts Grants.

Places of work recorded in the authority are El Paso. Work by James Drake is recorded in the collections of Smithsonian American Art Museum, Print Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art and Michael C. Distinctions recorded are Lucie Award and Guggenheim Fellowship.

• Name — James Drake • Birthplace — Lubbock, Texas • Field — Interdisciplinary visual arts • Training — Art Center College of Design • Website — https: jamesdrakeart.com/ • Awards — John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 2001. Nancy Graves Award for Visual Arts, 2001. National Endowment for the Arts Grant,!988 and 1989.

James Drake is an interdisciplinary artist currently living and working in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was born in Lubbock, Texas (1946) and earned a Masters of Fine Arts degree (1970) from the Art Center College of Design, in Los Angeles, where he studied with his mentor Lorser Feitelson. His drawings, video, sculpture, photography, printmaking and installations, investigate the human condition, emotions, and systems of communication, oftentimes through allegory to underscore the cyclical nature of history. During his time living in El Paso, Texas, issues related to the USA/Mexico border became a central theme in his body of work and the broader universal context he explores. The subject matter of Drake's artwork situates geo-political and social histories, as endlessly repeating narratives. Temporal-spatial relations are crucial to his art. The crossing, the transition, that most gives his work its power is that which cuts apart, yet links, the declared and the concealed, the public and the personal.

Tongue-Cut Sparrows was inspired by a system of sign language Drake observed women standing outside a jail in El Paso, Texas, used to communicate with prisoners on the inside. Fascinated by this inventive form of gestural communication, Drake became curious if the women could integrate quotes from literature and poetry into their sign language. They agreed to let Drake record their visits on video and worked with him in selecting texts to sign from the writings of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, Chicano-Apache American poet Jimmy Santiago Baca, Cormac McCarthy, as well as William Blake, William Shakespeare and Alighieri Dante. The series evolved into multi-channel video works, photographs, printmaking and large-scale charcoal drawings. In the photo-realistic drawings, images of the figures are joined by some of the words that were communicated between the couples. Often, there is a breakdown, or strain, in the communication—a tension that is emblematic of Drake's ongoing interest in the social dynamics of borderlands.

City of Tells is a series composed of drawings, split-screen video and an artist book. The work incorporates depictions of animals, portraits of family, friends, and diverse historical and contemporary influences such as Diego Rivera, Dante, Bruce Nauman, Murray Gell-Mann, La Malinche, Delacroix, Homer, Michelangelo, Herman Melville, and Goya. In gambling parlance, a "tell" is the subconscious broadcasting of one's emotional, psychological, and intellectual make-up. In the large-scale Renaissance tableau inspired drawing, Drake uses the motif of the banquet table to reference biblical tales and cultural mythology. "City of Tells" addresses a collective Western history and the interconnectedness of animal and human life. "Drake looks for the ‘tell,’ the sign that reveals the truth in his subjects and in him. The City of Tells addresses his concerns of the self-consciousness of culture and appetite of instinct."

This ongoing body of work explores themes of social complexities surrounding intersections between chaos, desperation, and forgiveness. The work grapples with some of the daunting, complicated questions facing a divided humanity. In 2022 the project matured into a collaborative performance that brings together Drake's visuals with artists from a number of different disciplines including writer Benjamin Sáenz, Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, New York performance artist Shaun Leonardo and Mexican multidisciplinary artist and flutist Alejandro Escuer.

Drake has had solo museum exhibitions at Site Santa Fe, Santa Fe, N.M.; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, Texas; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA. Group exhibitions include the 52nd International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; the Whitney Biennial 2000, New York, N.Y.;The National Museum of American Art and Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.