This chapter introduces the exhibition and is 3 minutes long. It was written by CUAG curators Heather Anderson, Sandra Dyck and Danielle Printup.
CUAG turned thirty in the fall of 2022; we’re celebrating our birthday with Drawing on Our History. 
Drawing on Our History is an experiment. We organized it using a polyvocal curatorial model that embodies and furthers our long history of collaborative exhibition-making. Each person on the curatorial team—five guest curators with whom CUAG has worked in the past and three CUAG staff members—invited a Canadian artist with a timely and compelling drawing practice. The drawings and drawing-based works made by these eight artists open conversations with drawings selected from Carleton University’s art collection.
Drawing on Our History illuminates over seventy years of art-collecting activity at Carleton. It presents the first drawing acquired by the University, which commissioned Elizabeth Harrison to render its crest and motto in 1951. It pays tribute to Jack and Frances Barwick, whose transformative 1984 bequest led to the founding of CUAG in 1992. It reflects on an exponential period of collection growth under the gallery’s first director, Michael Bell; today it includes 13,720 drawings, many of which were generously donated by artists and collectors. 
Drawing on Our History also features our most recent acquisition, the remarkable 2022 gift of Ed Pien’s Medusa, a monumental, shimmering composition drawn with a sharp knife. Pien’s arresting work points to some of the ways that artists use drawing today: to anchor personal and cultural identities; to investigate ideas, techniques, genres and traditions; to recuperate erased histories; to tell stories; to mitigate loss; to declare positions.
Drawing on Our History is installed by Patrick Lacasse and Andrew Johnson, amplified by public programs created by Fiona Wright and tours by Jessica Endress, and supported by administrator Vicki McGlinchey and research assistant Mckenzie Holbrook. Taken together, the work of the invited and collection-based artists, the guest curators and the CUAG team constitutes a multi-faceted look at drawing past and present, at the development of the University’s collection and at our evolution as an organization over three decades.
Thank you for your vital trust, generosity, participation, engagement and support. CUAG would not be here without you. You are an essential part of the gallery’s history, as well as its present and future.