menil foundation

Television and video’s influence on drawing practices and the ways they inspired new modes of graphic expression in the twentieth century

From the late 1950s to the 1980s, a period known as the network era, television reached its apex as a cultural force in the home, and portable video cameras became widely available. Examining how this new technology spurred artistic experimentation, this study considers the relationship between drawing and art made for the small screen of the domestic television set and early video cameras. These electronic screens entered artists’ studios for the first time and became a new source of imagery and a device that could be manipulated to generate entirely new kinds of drawing. An essay by Anna Lovatt looks at the ways in which early television and video images--captured, transmitted, and displayed through raster lines--inspired new possibilities for abstraction and expressing concepts of self-reflection and surveillance, while Kelly Montana explores artworks made by women who used the immediacy and familiarity of drawing to disrupt objectifying media representations of their gender by recording themselves drawing, often on their own bodies.

This copiously illustrated volume features drawings, film stills, videos, and multimedia installations by more than twenty artists both well-known and heretofore obscure, and includes discussions of the televisual imagery that permeates works on paper by Walter de Maria, the ways artists such as Anna Bella Geiger and Dennis Oppenheim used video to capture performative acts of drawing, and how Nam June Paik and Howardena Pindell treated the screen as a site of inscription.

Distributed for the Menil Collection

Exhibition Schedule:

The Menil Collection, Houston, TX
(October 4, 2025-February 8, 2026)

Anna Lovatt is associate professor of art history at Southern Methodist University. Kelly Montana is associate curator at The Menil Collection.