Member Tour | Willem de Kooning Drawing

Join your fellow SCA Members for a curator-led tour of Willem de Kooning Drawing.

Willem de Kooning Drawing is the first exhibition to examine the expansive drawing practice of this renowned American artist who immigrated to New York from the Netherlands at the age of 22. While many Art Institute visitors may be familiar with de Kooning’s monumental painting Excavation (1950), a cornerstone of our collection, this exhibition marks the first solo presentation of the artist’s work at our museum since 1969.

Since 2017, Kevin Salatino has served as Chair and Anne Vogt Fuller and Marion Titus Searle Curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has curated the exhibitions Ellsworth Kelly: Portrait Drawings (2023) and Mel Bochner Drawings: A Retrospective (2022), among others. Previously he was director of the art collections at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens; director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art; curator and head of Prints and Drawings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and curator of graphic arts at the Getty Research Institute. Kevin holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and earned his bachelor’s degree at Columbia University.

Mel Becker Solomon is the associate research curator for the Department of Prints and Drawings, where she specializes in modern and contemporary works on paper. She is a former collection cataloguer in the department (2013–16) and has researched thousands of objects in addition to writing essays on artists Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse. Prior to returning to the Art Institute in 2021, Becker Solomon was curator of the collection at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and a lecturer in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s art department.