Yaddo to Hold PAPER TRAILS Benefit Auction, 5/5-14

Marc Strausin New York City will open its galleries May 5-6 to offer an early look at items featured in “Paper Trails”, a unique auction of manuscripts, sketches, notes and drafts from selected artists that will help support Yaddo’s artists’ residency program.

The auction, part of the May 16th Yaddo New York City Benefit, focuses on what really happens at Yaddo – the intimate, idiosyncratic process of growing ideas: a poet revising a typescript; a sculptor sketching on graph paper; a composer writing out the first bars of an opera; a painter redrawing the outlines of a new composition. Even in the digital age, much of this early-draft creativity still happens on paper. This “paper trail” is symbolic of the creative process that Yaddo provides the time and space for artists to develop.

“Paper Trails” is curated by Yaddo painter Alexi Worth, who often writes about art for magazines such as Artforum, The New Yorker, Art in America, ARTnews, Slate, and other magazines. Worth also is a Director of The Corporation of Yaddo.

Artists represented in the auction include Philip Roth, Jennifer Egan, Maurizio Cattelan, Doug Wright, Carroll Dunham, Daron Hagen and Gardner McFall, AlFred Leslie, Rochelle Feinstein, Mary Frank, David Del Tredici, John Kelly, Suzan Frecon, Ellen Lanyon, Melissa Meyer, Irving Sandler, Gary Shteyngart, Amy Sillman, Trevor Winkfield, Jonathan Lethem, Tom Nozkowski, Andrew Solomon, and James Siena.

The gallery showing, which opens with a May 5th reception from 6 to 8 p.m., will allow viewers a chance to examine the featured items in “Paper Trails”, such as an early sketch by Frecon for her oil painting bloodstone/Dust; a page from Roth’s notebook while writing The Humbling and Nemesis; a handwritten score from Del Tredici’s Pulitzer Prize-winning In Memory of a Summer Day; and a handwritten first draft of the first two pages of Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit From the Goon Squad.

Auction online bidding will run from 8 a.m. May 5th until 9 p.m. May 14th. The last chance to bid will be at the benefit, to be held at Angel Orensanz Foundation on May 16th. Proxy bidding opportunities will be available for those unable to attend the event through Bidding for Good.

Marc Straus, a contemporary art gallery operated by Yaddo poet (and art collector) Marc Straus, is located at 299 Grand Street in New York City. Viewing hours for the “Paper Trails” exhibit will be 11 a.m.-6 p.m. May 5-6. For more information, click here.

Photo credit: Artwork by Rochelle Feinstein