Hands of the maker: a show of hands presents twelve drawings by Aldo Farnsworth, made with graphite, quarried chalk, and colored pigments on linen and hemp paper.

The works focus on the hands of makers captured with close attention to intimate details: the nuance of gesture, the particular way they hold a pencil or object, often with glasses at hand. These quiet arrangements suggest drawing, seeing, measuring, and making—the physical evidence of each subject’s creative work and daily life.

The handmade paper, with its deckle edges and distinctive felt-hair texture associated with Renaissance papers, layers another history into these contemporary portraits. Farnsworth makes the paper himself, raising worms to compost the linen, beating the hemp fibers, and forming each unique sheet, connecting the hands depicted in the drawings to his own hand through the material. The paper carries the physical presence of the artist who made it, just as the drawings carry the physical presence of the people they portray.

Artists and makers represented in the drawings include Timothy Berry, David Best, Squeak Carnwath, Guy Diehl, Guillermo Galindo, Mildred Howard, Peter Koch, Jerry Lin-Hsien Kung, Kiki Smith, Michael Wild, Andrew Williams, and Xiaoze Xie. The show is, in a literal sense, a show of hands—but also a portrait of artists through the things their hands reveal.