Curated by Maria Morris Hambourg

“Drawing is a verb,” Richard Serra’s bluntly provocative formulation, was the keynote back in 1976, when MoMA organized its first “Drawing Now” survey. For the third go-round, curator Laura Hoptman turns the tables: “Drawing is a noun again,” she notes wryly. But her show does more than highlight a shift toward unapologetic objectmaking. The “Eight Propositions” of her title are essentially professional fields (animation, fashion, architecture, etc.) from which artists like Kara Walker, John Currin, Chris Ofili, and Takashi Murakami have adapted their often intricate and implicitly narrative iconographies. Whether or not “Drawing Now” succeeds in crystallizing the rhetorical temperament of so much recent art, it ends up as a pictorialist’s banquet.

— Alexi Worth