Join us for a special evening of curators in conversation and an artist-led participatory drawing experience, inspired by works on paper featured in the exhibition Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler. Exhibition curator Valérie Rousseau and Laura Hoptman, executive director of The Drawing Center, will discuss working with drawings and the self-taught artists featured in both Memory Palaces and The Drawing Center’s concurrent exhibition The Pencil Is a Key: Drawings by Incarcerated Artists. Following their conversation, exhibition artist George Widener will share his interest in The Magic Square and facilitate a hands-on drawing exercise based on its visual and mathematical principles.

Laura Hoptman is the executive director of The Drawing Center in New York.

Valérie Rousseau is the senior curator of self-taught art and art brut at the American Folk Art Museum.

George Widener is a self-taught artist who employs his mathematical/calculating capability to create art ranging from complex calendars and numerical palindromes to Rembrandt-like antiquarian landscapes to Asian scrolls.

Image: Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930, Bern, Switzerland); untitled; 1918; graphite, crayon, and colored pencil on paper; 19 1/2 x 27 in.; Collection of Audrey B. Heckler. Photography © Visko Hatfield, courtesy of the Foundation to Promote Self Taught Art and Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.