In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney
Mon, Jun 30
|Drawing Center
In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney opens May 30–September 14, 2025, spotlighting the artist’s first major NYC museum show in over 30 years, and the first ever dedicated to his drawings.
Time & Location
Jun 30, 2025, 7:00 AM – Sep 14, 2025, 11:00 PM
Drawing Center, 35 Wooster St, New York, NY 10013, USA
About the event
Experience the expressive intimacy of Beauford Delaney’s visionary draftsmanship in In the Medium of Life, a landmark exhibition running from May 30 to September 14, 2025, and marking New York’s first museum retrospective of the artist in more than three decades.
Focusing for the first time on Delaney’s drawings, this exhibition brings together approximately 90 works on paper alongside select paintings and personal ephemera—offering rare insight into the personal, spontaneous, and deeply experimental space that drawing held in his practice.
Highlights include:
Works from Knoxville to Paris, reflecting his journey from Harlem Renaissance portraiture to lyrical abstraction
A comprehensive look at the stylistic dualities in his oeuvre: figuration vs. abstraction
Letters, photos, press clippings, and brochures that contextualize Delaney’s rich yet underrecognized legacy