“The Clamor of Ornament,” a dazzling new exhibition at the Drawing Center, gathers nearly 200 drawings, etchings, photographs, tunics and weavings to tell a complicated story, one that spans five centuries, about cultural exchange and appropriation.
The curators define ornament as “embellishment, surface or structural, that can be lifted from its context, reworked, reproduced, and redeployed.” This wide-open description gives them space to include nearly anything, and they do: There are Albrecht Dürer woodcuts from the early 1500s, a bark painting by an anonymous Papua New Guinean artist, a series of black-and-white cakes and pastries that the illustrator Tom Hovey drew for a coloring book version of “The Great British Bake Off.”
