“The Drawing Board" members are professors JJ Lee, Amy Swartz, and Natalie Majaba Waldburger. Our first public exhibition, "Back to the Drawing Board" was at Loop gallery in August 2017. As individual artists with 20+ year career spans, we have exhibited extensively, have work in both public and private collections and have been recipients of multiple grants and awards.

In the context post-secondary education, we have worked together in a variety of different contexts over the past fifteen years, from partnerships on creative projects and exhibitions, teaching in post-secondary institutions, and most recently working at OCAD University on establishing new specializations, curriculum, and teaching collaborations. We have a unique and common bond as artists, women, mothers, and educators and our creative dialogue seeks to investigate the complexities of work and working relationships in the context of an art university. The artwork examines the role of creativity and collaboration mediated by institutional structures.

The Drawing Board collaborative exhibition and performance was originally developed at Loop Gallery in Toronto, in which the administrative procedural policies of the institution were used as a structure to shape creative activity by a fictitious group called the “Drawing Board”. As a collaborative group of artists-educators working at the intersection of process and labour. The Drawing Board is both the title for our collective as well as the title for our performance piece. The satirical Drawing Board is comprised of three faculty and administrators at OCAD University. The meeting is enacted as a performance in which administrative and procedural protocols, used in the formal meetings of the institution, are used to shape creative activity during the performance, specifically drawings and art ideas; an attempt to make artwork by "consensus". As the performance proceeds, the challenges posed in following the “rules” verbatim, intersect and interfere with the creative process in different ways. Through public “meetings” Board members put forward various “motions” to start the process of creating an artwork. The “motions” are then subjected to Robert’s Rules of Engagement, at all stages of the creative process from idea (delivered as a motion), development (amendments to that motion), and completion (approve/deny the motion). Other artists and members of the public are invited to participate.

Natalie Majaba Waldburger

Artist Statements > Drawing Board