Carroll Dunham: Drawings 1974–2024

Carroll Dunham has spent fifty years drawing every day and archiving the results, and this is the first museum publication to treat that daily habit as the centre of his work rather than a supply line to the paintings.

Published by the Art Institute of Chicago in 2026 and distributed to the trade by Yale University Press, the 168-page volume carries 175 colour illustrations, many of them drawings never previously published. Edited by Thea Liberty Nichols, who also curated the accompanying exhibition, it includes Susan Tallman's essay The Ropemaker's Coil: Following Carroll Dunham's Line, with further contributions by Robert Storr and Makayla Bava. The selection follows Dunham from the abstract work of the 1970s and 1980s, made against the grain of ascendant Expressionism, through the decades in which his biomorphic forms hardened into outright figuration, producing the hypersexualised, cartoon-derived characters that connect him to underground comix, West Coast Funk and Chicago Imagism.

Dunham (b. 1949, New Haven) works in painting, printmaking and occasional sculpture, and the exhibition ran at the Art Institute of Chicago from 31 January to 1 June 2026. His gallery publications include In the Flowers, The Beach, produced with Karma and Galerie Eva Presenhuber.