Intown’s Spotlight on the Menil Drawing Institute’s “Lines of Resolution: Drawing at the Advent of Television and Video”

Howardena Pindell, Video Drawings Hockey, 1975

Intown luvs the Menil. We want readers to know about The Menil Drawing Institute’s new show:

The Menil Collection Opens “Lines of Resolution: Drawing at the Advent of Television and Video” on October 4 at the Menil Drawing Institute. This exhibition, which explores the relationship between drawing, television, and video from the late 1950s into the 1980s, is on view until February 8, 2026.

“Lines of Resolution” surveys the various ways artists have responded to television and video imagery through drawing during the “network era,” from the 1950s to the 1980s. This was a time when television became a dominant force in society and reached its peak as a tool for cultural control, while also inspiring political dissent and artistic experimentation.

The title of the exhibition—Lines of Resolution—refers to the amount of detail a television or video system can reproduce, while highlighting artists’ unwavering commitment to these emergent media. In the second half of the 20th century, electronic screens became a source of imagery, a surface for inscription, and a device that could be manipulated to generate entirely new kinds of drawing.

This presentation features more than fifty works on paper, video, mixed media sculpture, and an immersive installation, created by twenty-five artists from ten countries. Fascinated by this linear structure on screen, artists such as Nam June Paik and Jaime Davidovich were intrigued by the new possibilities it offered for abstract art. Other artists, including Walter De Maria and Philip Guston, incorporated recognizable imagery from broadcasts, as well as the box-like form of the television set into their drawings.

In the context of second-wave feminism, artists Sanja Iveković, Suzy Lake, and Letícia Parente, among others, performed the act of drawing for the camera, reflecting critically on the power dynamics in art education and images of femininity circulating in the mass media. Collaborative works by Dennis Oppenheim and Nina Sobell explored video’s potential to record and modify interpersonal communication, and artists like Howardena Pindell and Anna Bella Geiger engaged critically with broadcasting, disrupting, and reconfiguring televisual messages.

Dr. Anna Lovatt, exhibition co-curator and Associate Professor of Art History at Southern Methodist University, explained, “This exhibition developed out of my research as the inaugural Research Fellow at the Menil Drawing Institute in spring 2022. Beginning with works in the Menil’s collection and expanding to encompass a wide range of artists, the exhibition explores how the mass media functioned in different political contexts, and the strategies artists used to process and critique these messages via the medium of drawing.”

Kelly Montana, exhibition co-curator and Associate Curator, Menil Drawing Institute, said, “Aligning with the mission of the Menil Drawing Institute, the works on display in “Lines of Resolution” present new opportunities that artists found for drawing through its relationship to and its interactions with the small screen. Some of the artists featured used the screen as a surface, a mirror, and as an interface—prefiguring our use of screens today. Others used drawing to critique and deconstruct the power television exerts over its audience.”

Several of the works included in “Lines of Resolution” have never been exhibited in the United States, including the groundbreaking “raster pictures” of German artist Karl Otto Götz, and the room-sized installation 4 mensajes [4 messages], 1974, by Peruvian artist Teresa Burga. Taken together, the breadth of work in this exhibition suggests an unwavering commitment to the creative possibilities of new media.

“Lines of Resolution: Drawing at the Advent of Television and Video” is co-curated by Dr. Anna Lovatt, Associate Professor of Art History at Southern Methodist University, and Kelly Montana, Associate Curator, Menil Drawing Institute. A catalogue with new scholarship will accompany the exhibition.

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