SAN DIEGO, CA.- On Sunday, December 7, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego will open Drawing the Line at MCASD's downtown 1001 Kettner location. The exhibition, curated by MCASD Assistant Curator Lucía Sanromán, presents works on paper, sculpture, and fabric pieces from the Museum's collection that reveal new approaches to the integration of drafting techniques and line-making into media that have not been traditionally associated with drawing genres. The exhibition will be on view through April 12, 2009.

The exhibition features works by artists Amy Adler, Jacci Den Hartog, Kim Dingle, Iana Quesnell, Nancy Rubins, Margaret Honda, Marta Palau, Eugenie Geb, and Tania Candiani, who is represented in the exhibition with a new textile work. These artists are brought together with work by invited artists Marisol Rendón, from San Diego; Mely Barragán, from Tijuana; and Lynne Berman and Shizu Saldamando, from Los Angeles. Together, they present a broad range of approaches to drawing including traditional tonal renderings of landscape views; diagrammatic representations of situational maps; realistic portraiture; metaphorical use of the figure; mark-making as a record of past events; and drawing as performance.

Artists in the exhibition inflect their work with a feminist interest in the representation of their own point of view, understood as both a bodily and cognitive experience, within a growing matrix of visual associations--from cartography to animation and to abstract representation of space. They focus on the performative qualities of sketching a line, shading, and diagramming, incorporating aspects of performance art linked to the integration of the feminine body as a site of personal and political power.

Drawing the Line is part of a series of exhibitions that present works in the MCASD collection by women artists who live in or have been closely associated with Southern California and Baja California. Each of these exhibitions begins from an investigation of artworks in the MCASD collection, which are grouped by media. Collection pieces are augmented with selected works by invited women artists from Los Angeles to Ensenada. The first exhibition, Memory Is Your Image of Perfection, opened August 2, 2008, at MCASD's downtown 1001 Kettner galleries and features video and photographic works (through November 30, 2008).

Drawing the Line is part of MCASD's multiyear collection interpretation initiative, Connecting to Place, funded by The Getty Foundation. Additional support for the project comes from the Cochrane Exhibition Fund, The James Irvine Foundation, the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, and the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Fund.