Drew is perhaps best known for his large-scale sculptural works that utilize seemingly found materials—wood, rusted metal, cotton, rope, textile—that are in fact new. Drew “become[s] the weather,” burning, rusting, and dirtying these materials until they appear used and aged, subverting the viewer’s conception of time. He then compresses these materials into gridlike structures, creating a sort of organized chaos. Each work can be read as a record of the artist’s labor. Drew has put himself into the work.

For MONUMENTS, he revisits a seminal piece from his career, Untitled #25 (1992), in a new context. Number 363 (2023) combines the formal language of modernism and post-Minimalism with a material that harkens back to America’s origins and propelled the expansion of capitalism. This work contrasts the historic (cotton bale) and the contemporary (geometric large-scale sculpture), the natural raw material and the industrial abstracted form. As with all of Drew’s work, the piece is assigned a numeric rather than descriptive title to avoid influencing the viewer’s interpretation of it. Similarly, the geometric form invites individualized and personalized conceptions, in stark contrast to the extremely specific and evocative material. Though Number 363 appears uniform and mechanically produced, it was painstakingly handmade in Drew’s studio from 900 pounds of cotton, unrolled and compressed layer by layer over the course of weeks.

Cotton, particularly in its unprocessed form, cannot be disentangled from the history and legacy of slavery. The bale is inherently industrial, allowing for large-scale production and efficient storage and movement of organic goods. The antebellum South’s agrarian economy relied on cotton, and the burgeoning Industrial Revolution required immense amounts of human labor to pick the crop before it could be processed by machines, spurring an exponential growth in the population of enslaved people in the United States. Two and a half centuries later, cotton remains a charged symbol of the brutality inherent in the institution of chattel slavery. In working with it, Drew addresses this history head-on and reclaims the material for his own, eschewing the notion that abstraction is incompatible with social practice.

Unlike most of Drew’s mixed-media work, Number 363 can be approached in the round. Standing 9 1/2 feet tall and nearly 11 1/2 feet wide, its monumentality is a testament to the labor of enslaved African Americans that generated the wealth upon which this country was built.