Up to the Mark

It all begins with a line: one point connects to another in space, and that connection begets form and meaning. Drawing as Practice, a vast show filling the three galleries and passage of the National Academy of Design’s Chelsea exhibition space, covers the roughly two hundred years of the institute’s existence, beginning with some bravura academic anatomical studies—quickly piqued by Walter Shirlaw’s notoriously, let’s say, lifelike Study of Male Nude with Staff (1871)—and moving through mark-making’s utilization in op art, conceptual, and contemporary figuration strategies.

On one blockbuster wall, curators Sara Reisman and Natalia Viera offer a blueprint for thinking through drawing’s centrality to architecture. Graphite or pencil works by César Pelli, Billie Tsien, Charles Gwathmey, and others seem to will structures into existence. Their handiwork, especially convincing, conveys spatial information and emotional weight at once. Even the best-laid line, like the most careful of plans, can go its own way: Avram Finkelstein’s proposal The People’s Fountain (2022) …