DRAW ME NEWTOWN / A DRAW Space fundraiser
A fundraiser for DRAW Space, opening 6pm Thursday 16 July. Exhibition runs until 5pm Sunday 19 July. All drawings for sale.
DRAW Space is hosting an exhibition of small drawings featuring Newtown and you can be in the show. All you need to do is to make a drawing on the front of our postcard using any medium you like. Your drawing needs to be about Newtown, something that you love about this awesome area.
Come into the gallery during opening hours and pick up a postcard – 31A Enmore Road Newtown Gadigal.
Open Thursday, Friday, Saturday 11-5, Sunday 12-5.
All drawings will be for sale for $20 – proceeds will go to DRAW Space, a non-profit, artist-run, contemporary drawing gallery. You can drop off your drawing any time by bringing it into the gallery during opening hours or putting it under the door after hours. You can post your drawing to PO Box 352 Newtown NSW 2042.
The deadline to deliver drawings is 5pm Sunday 5 July.
Come and celebrate Newtown at the opening of the show with the DRAW Space community and take home an artwork for $20!
Big thanks to all the artists who came to the ‘drop in and draw’ event on Monday 27 April. See you at the opening!
Made, Seen, Experienced.
Contemporary drawing x DRAW Space 2023 – 2026
The exhibition DRAW ME Newtown marked the end of the first era of DRAW Space (and of 3 years on Enmore Road, Newtown). In a moving cascade of colour and form, little bricks of support and hope had arrived, over two hundred A5 postcards. Each card was a drawing of goodwill for the future of DRAW Space. The intent, true to our foundational idea was to throw open drawing to and by all, in a democratised embrace of our tenet that everyone can draw. Artists who had exhibited with us before responded, including internationally, but also in the mix were non-artists, locals, children, drop-ins. A quick drawing on the spot in a workshop was as valuable to show as one drawn carefully over time. Installation was organic rather than strictly gridded, each drawing guided and placed according to those around it. Opening night unfolded as anonymised sales of these drawn gifts took place, with funds raised to facilitate the continuation of DRAW Space, another era and space ahead.
In so many ways, I look back on our time at DRAW Space and see it as some form of living studio, or bell jar. Within it, a group of artists lived a shared project on a spectrum of art fulfilling life to life fulfilling art. DRAW Space’s venue in Newtown was a white cube for sure, but a warm one. Inwardly, an ARI is a laboratory of artists working together to test ideas and practice, in a shared and communal labour. Outwardly, the work of DRAW Space was to engage with ideas embodied in contemporary drawing. As such, we defined drawing by few words, as we worked with “a broad definition of what drawing is and encourage continued research and exploration of what it can be.” As a curatorial collective, we worked to unravel the latency of drawing through the ensuing series of over 60 events and exhibitions.
For drawing, as it turned out, can be noisy - or quiet; collective but also singular; performative, private; vulnerable, precocious; controlled, chaotic; local, even global. These realised cadences were thrilling but there was more to the project. For us as a collection of artists, DRAW Space was something we did while we pursued our own art practices. I’ve often pondered the idea that in the contemporary art world there is a shifting indexation of values between artist, artwork, platform. Values shift according to context, however, DRAW Space was a place where each element could hang in balance. In achieving that we had worked to create cultural meaning beyond (art) industry norms and the usual artworld cycling of celebrity, commodity, and funding. And so, as DRAW ME (Newtown) closed, buoyed by support, behind the fogged-up windows we shared a meal in the space we had made for DRAW Space. Not a last supper, more of a preparatory drawing for the transformation to follow.
© Lisa Pang, August 2026