Ways of Seeing: Writings on Drawings from the Jack Shear Collection

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Ways of Seeing: Three Takes on the Jack Shear Drawing Collection, this anthology takes as its subject what contributor Nick Mauss call the “singular fluency between drawing and writing.” Building on the exhibition’s themes of perception and personal vision, nine renowned writers were asked to reflect on drawings of their choosing from Shear’s collection. The group of authors, comprising a fashion writer, an artist, an art historian, as well as poets and fiction writers, offer us poignant and insightful stories, poems, personal ruminations, and visual analyses of objects from across countries and centuries. The result is a unique marriage of visual art and literature that testifies to the uncontainable power of art to make meaning over and over and over again.