Drawing & Driving

Recumbent Bicycle, paper, colored Pencils

Various Locations, Colorado
Steven J. Yazzie, 2023-24

Created at various sites throughout the US, Drawing and Driving (2006-present) is an ongoing series of drawings and videos that chronicle Yazzie’s drawings of the landscape in front of him while navigating a moving vehicle. The series began during Yazzie’s residency at Skowhegan School for Painting and Architecture in 2006, where Yazzie built a gravity-powered vehicle and attempted to draw the scenery around him while moving downhill. By adding the element of momentum to these drawing performances, Yazzie continues the history of plein air art making, adding time, frenetic energy, and chance to the process of capturing an atmosphere or landscape. 

At MCA Denver, he presents recent drawings and footage from three recent Drawing and Driving performances in Pike National Forest, the South Platte River, and Denver in Colorado. Reflecting on this ongoing body of work, Yazzie notes, “It’s a wild experience and the drawing vehicle itself becomes an appendage to the mark-making, as if the will of the machine is imposing itself through every crank and turn it makes. This is the speed of life, how one travels through grandeur, and attempts to capture the world passing us by. Drawing and Driving helps to qualify this in a way nothing else does in my practice.”