American Drawings 1963-1973

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York: May 25 - July 22, 1973

The Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1973 exhibition American Drawings 1963–1973 examined the primary gesture, intimate grammar, and temporal nature of drawing across a decade of post-war American practice, encompassing works by sculptors, painters, conceptualists, and draughtsmen.

Featuring work by over thirty artists—including Sol LeWitt, Dorothea Rockburne, Cy Twombly, Brice Marden, Dan Flavin, Chuck Close, and Vija Celmins—the survey explored drawing's historical evolution from an ephemeral Renaissance study to an autonomous, nonverbal language of visual directness. Slavin’s practice during this pivotal decade directly engaged these expanded vocabularies, employing hand-drawn linear matrices, delicate pigment washes, and transparent structural scaffolds that elevated the preliminary mark into an atmospheric, self-contained work of art.