Nat Meade: Drawings is an exhibition catalog that accompanied an eponymous show I curated at One Mile Gallery in Kingston, New York, in September 2022. The book includes all 24 drawings (reproduced at actual size) by the Brooklyn-based artist that were featured in the exhibition.

Like Nat’s acclaimed paintings, the focus of these drawings is on fatherhood and other masculine tropes, which he subjects to a near-forensic analysis. As I described his work in my 2019 review in Artforum, “Meade’s works traffic in both the sacred and the profane in their attempt to embrace, dissect, and, on some level, destroy the father figures we all ultimately come to terms with, one way or another.” In the drawings, Meade submits these figures—nearly all sporting impossibly voluminous beards—to crashing waves, wind gusts, encroaching plant forms, and, in several works, decapitation. The medium of drawing has added a mesmerizing precision and deliberateness to Nat’s work, amplifying both the humor and the pathos in this remarkable artist’s trademark subject matter.