PITTSBURGH, PA.- Carnegie Museum of Art is presenting an exhibition exploring the drawing practice of famed 20th-century architect Lina Bo Bardi. Lina Bo Bardi Draws brings together a selection of nearly 100 drawings, ranging from Bo Bardi's early life to the end of her career, from more than 6,000 drawings in her extensive archives in São Paulo.

Bo Bardi was a prolific and idiosyncratic designer. Born in Italy, she was educated in Rome and worked in the Milan studio of the Modernist architect Gio Ponti. Bo Bardi moved to Brazil in 1946, where her interest in local materials and practices enriched her Modernist approach to design. Her most notable projects include the Museu de Arte in São Paulo (MASP) and SESC Pompeia, a factory rehabilitated into a cultural center, also in São Paulo. Her creative work extended far beyond architecture, incorporating furniture and jewelry design, theatrical design, teaching, curating, and architectural criticism.

The exhibition invites visitors to explore the importance of drawing to this influential architect's design process and built work. Completed in a variety of media—pencil, watercolor, gouache, felt pen, pen and ink—the drawings reveal Bo Bardi's broad view of design and architecture as accessible to everyone, nurtured by her interest in nature and everyday life.

"Drawing, with its slow and intimate gestures, was her way of dwelling in the world," writes curator Zeuler R. Lima, PhD, in his introduction to Lina Bo Bardi Drawings (Princeton University Press, 2019). "Drawing conveyed, at the tip of her hands, a representational purpose and also a somewhat magical realism spell."

A version of this exhibition, also curated by Lima, appeared at the Fundacío Joan Miró in Barcelona as Lina Bo Bardi Drawing from February to May 2019.

Lina Bo Bardi Draws is curated by Zeuler R. Lima and brought to the museum by the Heinz Architectural Center.