Exhibition Title: Drawing from Life: Steve Mumford in Iraq, 2003-2004

Inspired by Winslow Homer’s Civil War paintings, Steve Mumford made four trips to Iraq in 2003 and 2004 to chronicle military and civilian life in the U.S.-occupied country. Traveling between Basra, Baghdad, Tikrit, Samarra, Karbala, Kirkuk, Dohuk and Hilla as an embedded journalist credentialed by the on-line magazine Artnet.com, the artist produced hundreds of watercolor and sepia drawings that capture the day-to-day existence of soldiers on the frontline, and Iraqis trying to maintain some semblance of routine activities in the midst of their war-torn country. In August 2003, the artist posted on Artnet.com the first of what would number sixteen installments of the “Baghdad Journal,” a diaristic account of his time in Iraq, the margins of which were illustrated with thumbnails of the drawings and photographs he took of his experiences. Drawing from Life presents forty of Mumford’s works, with the most recent drawings completed in October 2004, just a few days before he returned to the United States from his fourth trip to Iraq.

A native of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and presently based in New York City, Steve Mumford received an MA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1986) and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York (1994). In addition to his work in Iraq, Mumford is widely respected for his large-scale narrative canvases that explore the tensions involved when man and nature encounter one another.

Drawing from Life: Steve Mumford in Iraq, 2003-2004 was curated collaboratively by Matthew Kolodziej, Assistant Professor of Art at the Myers School of Art, University of Akron, Ohio, and Gregory Wittkopp, Director of Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, with the assistance of Magdalena Sawon, Postmasters Gallery, New York City. Before opening at [The Moore Space], the exhibition was presented at the University Art Galleries, Myers School of Art, University of Akron, November 1 through December 3, 2004, and Cranbrook Art Museum at Cranbrook Academy of Art, January 29 through April 3, 2005.