Sketch, Shade, Smudge: Drawing from Gray to Black

Discover how simple tools can be powerful vehicles for artistic expression. This exhibition celebrates the act of drawing using familiar tools—charcoal, chalk, crayon, and graphite. Each material exhibits distinctive properties: charcoal can be intensely rich and velvety or delicately gray and suggestive, while graphite is slippery, shiny and easy to erase. Crayon is deeply black and waxy, whereas chalk can be crumbly and diffuse. The creative manipulations of these media—smudging, scraping and erasing—make them versatile tools for adding intensity, depth, precision and expression to an artist’s vision.

Sketch, Shade, Smudge: Drawing from Gray to Black showcases around 120 captivating works, spanning from the 19th to 21st centuries, alongside artists’ materials from the Harvard Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. Visitors will enjoy drawings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, John Singer Sargent, and Odilon Redon, alongside 20th and 21st century artists such as Piet Mondrian, Lyonel Feininger, Diego Rivera, Richard Serra, John Wilson, Isabella Quintanilla and Toyin Ojih Odutola, all of whom push their use of drawing media in new directions.