Artists

Leonardo Drew is a contemporary artist celebrated for his monumental abstract sculptures and installations that transform raw materials into meditations on memory, history, and the passage of time. Over more than three decades, Drew has developed a distinctive practice rooted in processes of oxidation, burning, weathering, and decay. Working with materials such as wood, cotton, paper, and metal—always newly sourced, though often mistaken for found objects—he creates accumulations that balance chaos and order, recalling America’s industrial past while evoking the cyclical nature of existence.

Raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, near the housing project and landfill that shaped his early visual memories, Drew channels those formative experiences into intricate sculptural configurations. Whether jutting from walls or sprawling across rooms, his works challenge architectural space while embodying labor, transformation, and persistence.

Drew studied at Parsons School of Design and earned his BFA from Cooper Union (1985). He has received numerous honors, including the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (2011), a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1994), and residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem (1991), Skowhegan (1998), and Artpace (1995).

His work has been presented internationally in major solo and group exhibitions, including the Carnegie International (1995), Biennial Dakar (1992), SCAD Museum of Art (2013), DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park (2011), and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2000). Drew’s sculptures are in the permanent collections of leading institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Tate (London), the Phillips Collection, the Wadsworth Atheneum, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, among many others.