Tool Room, 1980
Welded Steel, 96" x 144" x 96"
James Drake was born in Lubbock, Texas, in 1946, and lived in Guatemala from 1955 to 1959. He received a B.A. and an M.F.A. from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. Drake has exhibited widely, including shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California, and the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, former Yugoslavia. In 1989 he received a Southeast Center for Contemporary Art Award in the Visual Arts and A National Endowment for the Arts Grant and Travel Fellowship. His work can be found in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Birmingham Museum of Fine Art, Alabama, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Known primarily as a sculptor, Drake is also an accomplished painter, draftsman, and printmaker. In the late 1970s he began a series of monochromatic, theme-based room installations in cast metals, including Tattoo Parlor and The Tool Room, which play with the viewer’s notion of reality. By the mid-1980s he had turned his attention to the conflicts and paradoxes of life along the Texas-Mexico border. Often confrontational and foreboding, his haunting images explore the dynamics of aggression in social exchange in the tradition of Goya, Géricault, and Rivera. Drake uses a wide array of symbols – including weapons, trophies, flowers, and snakes – to convey moral and spiritual struggle, mixing traditional artists’ materials with industrial products and charred refuse to lend a sense of passion and physical force to his works.
*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.