Luck of the draw ‘The Drawing Show’ at the Mills and Oona Stern at MassArt BY RANDI HOPKINS

The wall has been an alluring and provocative Big Blank Canvas for artists who think outside the box in recent years. Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner have used museum and gallery walls as a primary support for drawings since the 1970s, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring stealthily marked up public walls throughout New York City starting later that decade, and artists as varied as Matthew Ritchie and Raymond Pettibon have given more recent voice to the enclosures that surround us — not to mention those savvy guys marking up cave walls at Lascaux many years earlier. For artists, walls offer the possibility of expansive scale, as well as the challenge of inherent physical inconsistencies and spatial idiosyncrasies — your fresh sheet of Arches paper is not likely to have an electrical outlet or a window in the middle of it, or a badly patched lump of spackle.

In this spirit of adventure and also of getting back to basics, "The 19th Drawing Show" opens on November 18 at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Mills Gallery with 14 installations created directly on the gallery’s walls by 17 artists. This year’s edition of the biannual exhibition was jurored by Denise Markonish, director/curator at Artspace in New Haven, and over the phone she enthuses, "The ‘Drawing Show’ has become an institution in Boston. Drawing is so fascinating, something we always come back to. It brings us back to the idea of immediate experience. For this show, some artists will have as much as 10 by 15 feet of wall space. We wanted to give the artists lots of room to make bold statements, and to allow them to think about drawing in a new way."

Mills Gallery director Laura Donaldson, who initiated the idea of soliciting proposals for wall drawings this year, notes the experimental quality of the work but says the show is still focused on the primary aspects of drawing, the physical act of making marks: "It’s important that a non-profit space offer a chance for artists to do something they couldn’t do elsewhere." She also draws attention to the variety of the works, from Necee Regis’s small drawings of jet planes to Katherine Desjardins’s expansive installation exploring the illusionary aspects of perspective drawing to an elaborate undertaking by the team of Nick Z and Mister Never covering walls, ceiling, floor and who knows what else with their graffiti-style art.

The New York–based Oona Stern uses material we surround ourselves with, — wood flooring, paving stones, shingles, box hedges — to allude to building techniques and architectural materials in sculpture that straddles the line between "built" and "drawn." She created a memorable welcome mat at the entrance to the "Inside Space" show at MIT a few years back. On November 15, Stern shares her thoughts as part of the school’s series of Visiting Artist Lectures.

"The 19th Drawing Show" @ the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont St, South End | Nov 18–Jan 8 | 617.426.5000 or http://www.bcaonline.org/ | Oona Stern: Visiting Artist Lecture @ Mass College of Art, Trustees Room 11th floor, Tower Building, 621 Huntington Ave, Boston | Nov 15, 6 pm | 617.879.7333 or http://www.massart.edu/