The Drawing Board is a group of three artist-educators who, through collaborative artwork, explore drawing’s capacity for speaking to the social and ecological issues we face as women, mothers of children with disabilities, and racialized individuals against the backdrop of inequitable systems. Since we formed in 2016, we have created public drawing performances that mimic bureaucracy, including a mock Board with “official meetings”, agendas, minutes, voting processes, and invented standing and subcommittees committees. Using governance structures based on real-life institutional practices, we create a platform that allows participants to use humour and drawing to illustrate and critique how these systems can shape dialogue and collective thinking. “Drawing Board Meetings’’ and collaborative drawing installations have been performed and exhibited in artist-run, academic and gallery spaces.
This project has been supported by Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, OCAD U, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.