Leonardo Drew

Born in 1961 in Tallahassee, Florida, Leonardo Drew was raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he has frequently cited his childhood proximity to a landfill near the P.T. Barnum Apartments—a complex he described as ‘God’s mouth,’ for its seemingly endless capacity to consume the kinds of discarded material that would become foundational to his understanding of transformation, impermanence and renewal. Watching such materials broken down and reconstituted there would influence his later artistic practice.

Drew first exhibited his work at the age of thirteen in a solo presentation of action-figure drawings at State National Bank in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He later studied at Parsons School of Design, ultimately turning away from illustration to pursue gestural abstraction and process-driven assemblage before receiving his BFA from Cooper Union in 1985. During this period, he was taught and mentored by Jack Whitten, who encouraged his artistic exploration and introduced him to a broader lineage of Black artists working outside dominant narratives and processes. Among these were Mel Edwards, Sam Gilliam, Joe Overstreet, Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, whose sustained engagement with abstraction helped affirm Drew’s own evolving visual language.

Since the late 1980s, Drew has attracted international attention and critical recognition for works that confront both personal and collective histories through abstraction. His breakthrough work, ‘Number 8’ (1988), incorporated animal hides, feathers and wood in a visceral exploration of the interconnected forces of violence and transformation, while later works expanded in scale and ambition to encompass monumental installations that engulf architectural spaces. His mid-career survey, ‘Existed,’ premiered at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston in 2009 and subsequently traveled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

In 2019, Drew unveiled ‘City in the Grass,’ his first major public commission, for Madison Square Park in New York City—an expansive installation that marked a significant shift in his practice through the introduction of color and an invitation for viewers to physically engage with the work by walking around, sitting and gathering within it. In 2020, the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) presented ‘Leonardo Drew: Making Chaos Legible,’ a major solo exhibition that highlighted the artist’s evolving engagement with pigment, material experimentation and immersive installation.

Drew’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford; and Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson. His work is held in major public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; and Tate, London, among others. He has also collaborated with Merce Cunningham on the production ‘Ground Level Overlay.’ Drew lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and San Antonio, Texas.