The Big Draw: A Climate of Change

Hauser & Wirth is celebrating The Big Draw this October.  The Big Draw is the world’s largest drawing festival with thousands of drawing activities connecting people of all ages with museums, outdoor spaces, artists, designers, illustrators – and each other. The Big Draw annually involves 1,000+ organisers on seven continents, engaging around 400,000 people. This year’s theme for the festival is: ‘A Climate of Change’. 

We shall focus on the tree, as a vital component of our ecology system and a metaphor for life. The tree often appears in the work of the LA-based conceptual artist, esteemed CalArts educator, and recipient of the 2019 Edward MacDowell Medal,  Charles Gaines. His body of work engages formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and the subjective realms. Whether conceptual or representational, we invite you to stop and observe the world around you afresh, to engage in your immediate environment and create your own new visual languages.

The activity invites us all to respond to the tree in a new way, to challenge yourself to represent a tree in an alternative format and not simply to draw how you generally see it. You could; draw the sound of a tree, the texture of bark, the age of a tree, a map of all the trees in the world, draw a family tree, a tree of the future, a mechanical tree... What else can you think of?

Through October, we will be sharing your submissions on social media. Share your artwork using #HauserWirthBigDraw #ClimateOfChange and tag @hauserwirth @TheBigDraw to be a part of our global campaign. You can also join our Facebook community here.