Eakins in Perspective took place at the Museum of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) from December 1, 2017–January 7, 2018. The exhibition featured four drawings by Thomas Eakins from the museum’s collection, displayed in conversation with a series of machine-made pencil drawings and accompanied by a machine-drawn list of works and the following statement:
For this exhibition, I taught a machine to make graphite drawings. The machine’s course of instruction was in accordance with Thomas Eakins’ drawing manual, a product of his teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The subjects of these drawings are the fundamentals of my own education as a PAFA student: studies of antique sculpture, applied systems of measurement, and the theoretical construction of an object in space. My role as programmer was to provide instructions for a drawing in the form of vector paths, sorted by their two-dimensional coordinates on a sheet of paper and organized by the softness of the graphite and pressure required for each mark. In the back room, reproductions of Renaissance chalk drawings were converted into lithographic plates through a similar process, and printed in an ink made from hand-ground natural minerals such as sanguine, hematite, and black chalk. As our experiences of the contemporary world are increasingly mediated by digital processes, these works question the role of the artist’s hand, the value of skilled artistic labor, and the importance of an artwork’s material presence.
