Lucy Raven, A Crisis Passed in Sleep, 2005. Hand-drawn animation, 4 minutes, 1 second.

Lucy Raven, When the Ceiling Has Become Visible, 2005. Hand-drawn animation, 2 minutes, 58 seconds.

Lucy Raven’s hand-drawn animations, entitled A Crisis Passed in Sleep and When the Ceiling Has Become Visible, were both inspired in part by Walker Evans and James Agee’s book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. As in Evans and Agee’s project, which documents everyday life in the American South during the Great Depression, Raven’s animations depict the barren fields and quiet struggle of agricultural workers.

As in other works by Raven, the artist uses film to explore social issues and the relationship between still images, moving images, and real life. The labor-intensive process used by Raven for these two animations, as well as the sensitive and delicate nature of each hand-drawn frame, reflects the empathy for rural life that was famously evoked by Evans and Agee’s book.

To learn more about Lucy Raven, check out the artist’s website, here.

To submit a video proposal to our online gallery, please email Amber Harper, Assistant Curator, at amoyles@drawingcenter.org, including a brief description and a video link.