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Everything for Frank Walter was a throwaway—and everything a discovery of who and where he was. At his death in 2009, the black artist left thousands of paintings and drawings on top of hundreds of hours of tapes.

That is just for starters. His two thousand photographs run mostly to Polaroids, because what could come more quickly, with no chance for second thoughts? A stack of paper, a single manuscript, reaches easily to one’s waist. Who would dare to turn its pages even if one could touch? Who would dare, too, to call it a memoir, a fiction, or a lecture on art? And still he sought, as the show’s title puts it, “To Capture a Soul.”

To be sure, there is hardly a soul in sight at the Drawing Center, through September 15. An African woman in pencil may not count as a portrait, no more than a young Fidel Castro nearby on the wall. They are emblems of something more lasting than a lifetime, much like his carved wood after African sculpture. If they are also suspiciously generic, he could live with that. Like all of nature, they respond to him—and, together with a recent report on another freewheeling black artist, Della Wells, it is the subject of a longer review in my latest upload. Does that make him an outsider artist, and what about Wells?

For so undisciplined an artist, Walter stuck to a task long after another would have moved on. He could well have been high-functioning autistic in his embrace of ritual, his refusal to hide anything, and his absence of confession. If there is a self-portrait anywhere in his work, apart from the body of work itself, it lies in an otherwise anonymous man up a tree. Yet he left his native Antigua in 1953, still in his twenties, to find the other half of his heritage, and he remained in Europe until 1961. Another artist might have spent those years in museums, to claim their tradition as his own, or immersed himself in white, African, and Caribbean communities for their humanity and culture. Walter headed for the library.

Or rather he headed for libraries, that marvel of English cities, because he could do nothing singly. And there he turned out one family tree after another. Naturally they are dense to the point of illegible, their words covering entire sheets. Who can say what sprang from library research, what from a remembered oral history, and what from an active imagination? They have a curious echo in drawings of actual trees, their leaves a splatter of red and black akin to an explosion. This artist’s god does and does not lie in the details.

Back home, he pursued the same uncanny mix of the obvious and unexpected. Maybe you know Antigua for sunlight and white sand. Walter sees rippling water in a dark wood, even as it emerges into the light. The sun rests on a mountain peak, like the product of a volcano. Animals are sketchier (and awfully cute), but they tend to one another when they are not looking at him. A cow jumps over a fence, if not the moon.

If they border on nursery rhymes, Walter wrote music, too, in typically sloppy but mostly accurate notation. Anything can go into the mix, and anything can as a ground for oil—including photocopies, disks of auto insulation, backs of unsold Polaroids, and boxes of film. The curator, Claire Gilman, arranges things roughly by subject, because she has no choice. Work from nearly sixty years is almost entirely undated. It may not be consistently great either, but he never have cared for greatness. He wanted only to see himself as part of a larger world.

If Walter leaves things a bit sketchy, Josh Smith embraces the charge. “This is how it is,” he writes—and it has to be, because it finds completion in what is yet to come. “It refers forward,” he claims of his work, but for once it also looks back, and he conceives his show in the Center’s back room as an homage to Walter, as “Life Drawing.” Is this real life? Since his debut in the 2009 New Museum “Generational,” Smith has become an art-world favorite for what another group show called “everyday abstraction.” Here, though, he tends to leaves, fish, birds, and palms as well.

If Walter makes art his fever dream and culture his library, Smith has appeared in a show of “The Feverish Library” as well, and he still piles it on. I have dismissed him more than once as slapdash, glib, and cheesy. There is no doubting, though, his facility and charm. Even the Grim Reaper looks anything but grim. Can he make Walters self-conscious childishness look downright grown-up? Maybe, he seems to say, there are limits to adulthood.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Joan Jonas speaks of wanting to capture “the shape, the scent, the feel of things.” If that suggests a raw immediacy, she works fast.

The Drawing Center fills all three of its galleries with some three hundred works, chosen from more than two thousand. Is even that a mere preface to her retrospective at MoMA? It is a challenge to Jonas herself to keep up with the pace of things. These are not simply things observed or the things in themselves, but things for both her senses and as they appear to themselves. They ask what drawing can still mean to an artist known not for so-called fine art, but for video, installation, and performance.

Drawings for Jonas sure look immediate, like the wild shape of things. Her line may seem barely to hold together, and so might a recognizable living creature. She calls her show “Animal Vegetable Mineral,” through June 2, and animals by far win out. What could that have to do with new media? What about an artist who has lived in Soho for fifty years, just up the street from the Drawing Center today? “I know,” she insists, “what is around me”—which may sound more like boutiques, warehouses, and cobblestones than nature.

Still, performance for Jonas has always meant experiencing her surroundings, going back to Wind in 1968. And the Drawing Center brings a more recent video of two women, one of them the artist, walking by the sea. Their paths cross as they hold out a paper cone, like a makeshift megaphone or telescope, but without a sign of communication or recognition. One can see what she means by an art of “incurable solitude.” It is also art with a sense of humor and experiment. Whatever it takes to see or fail to see.

She has summered in Nova Scotia, collecting rocks from the Canadian wilds, and a table holds its share. (She began as a sculptor, and one might hope for hints to her early work, but good luck with that.) She keeps looking, too, with the same ambiguity as to whether she is looking for nature or herself. Her drawings turn to butterflies and bees, seen up close, rendered in ink on paper folded in half. It brings out their symmetry, but also her love of accident. The back of a bee could just as well be an animal’s spine or its gaping black maw.

The curators, Laura Hoptman with Rebecca DiGiovanna, take things not chronologically but in series. They can hardly help it, not with a series of thirty-seven dogs or forty-seven birds. It is a human creation all the same. Dogs are domestic animals, and the rest could belong to the artist’s backyard or her imagination. She has drawn fish “as they are in the sea,” but how would she know without imagination? She has sketched snowflakes, but they have already melted away.

They have a life of themselves all the same. A series for Jonas is not so much variations on a theme as a focus of attention. It also has its impetus in her media. What begins as wild freehand may not stay that way, and what looks immediate may be anything but. It may run to a single intricate loop in response to traditional Irish patterning—what a video calls Mystic Knots. It may also run to chance.

She has her Rorschach tests, in folded paper or melting ice. She has worked with a twig dipped in ink and made puppets from photocopies. Like David Hammons or Yves Klein, she has made art from the traces of a human body, her own or another woman’s—on paper and in performance. It can be hard to know one subject, human or animal, from another. The show opens with faces in profile, with more dips and turns than needed for just a nose and a mouth. Who, though, can say in advance the shape of things?

Did I say that The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things is also the title of a video? I turn soon, I promise, to her MoMA retrospective.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.