From October 2021 through September 2022, the Menil Collection presents NETWORK, a monumental site-specific work by Marcia Kure. The work is the latest commission for the Menil Drawing Institute, which has featured an ongoing series of ephemeral wall drawings since the building opened in 2018. The series began as part of the Drawing Institute's commitment to seeking new approaches to the form and language of drawing, and Kure's installation is the third in this ongoing series. 

Through her multidisciplinary art practice, Kure examines a wide range of concepts, including colonial legacies and diasporic identities. She is known for compositions that feature the curvilinear Uli line, an abstract design motif associated with Nigeria and best known for its application in temporary circumstances like body painting and murals, as well as her use of natural, plant-based pigments extracted from kola nuts, indigo, and tea. Exploring line as concept, form, and experience, the artist puts pressure on the material properties and possibilities of her drawing media, and their status as commodities for tracing and mapping the African diaspora. Kure's wall drawing uses the line as a metaphor for and map of contemporary and historical trade routes. These largely invisible networks and webs are traced across space and time, making connections that implicate the viewer in a history of migration, labor, and exploitation. The accumulation of lines in the work signifies connections between interlocking networks of sociopolitical control, mass surveillance, and capitalism.

According to Menil Drawing Institute Curator Kelly Montana, Uli designs come from a tradition of mark-making that dates back to at least the 9th century. Marcia Kure incorporates this legacy into a contemporary understanding of the medium: drawing as line in space, drawing as the expression of multiple temporalities, drawing as journey —  all of these concepts are present in the artist's work.

Drawing has been a life-long journey. It’s been a language that I’ve been trying to understand for the longest time — from historic South African cave drawings, to collage, to sewing—trying to find my own way of drawing the line. For me, NETWORK is an accumulation of my practice up to this point. I returned to the lines that I began with, which now have more meaning and depth. I asked myself, ‘how do you collapse time and space, merging the past, present and the future?’ Line, I’ve always understood, is not a mere mark on paper, it’s something that contains memory, purpose, and thought. Line is something that we all engage with daily, our entire body participates in making the mark, implicating us all in a vast interconnected and entangled network that continues beyond the wall.

— Marcia Kure