By Sydney Ritter | Scottsdale Arts
Exploring how artists use mark-making and linework to construct form and give shape to ideas, “Mark + Making,” opening at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) on March 21, features selections drawn from the SMoCA Collection.
SMoCA’s permanent collection includes more than 2,000 artworks spanning a range of cultures, time periods, and artistic practices. Encompassing paintings, prints, drawings, ceramics, sculpture, and other contemporary works, the collection offers fertile ground for uncovering unexpected relationships. Assistant curator Keshia Turley, who works closely with the collection, often finds connections between artworks surface in unexpected ways.
“While researching pieces for other exhibitions, I began noticing how many artists were using line and mark-making in strikingly varied and conceptually rich ways,” Turley said. “I became really intrigued by the idea of focusing an exhibition from SMoCA’s collection around how artists use mark-making and linework — not just as formal elements but as a way of thinking, exploring, and communicating.”
“Mark + Making” brings together drawings, paintings, prints and sculpture works that foreground the physical and conceptual processes through which mark-making articulates ideas and form. The exhibition highlights a wide range of artistic approaches, from gestural marks that convey immediacy and intuition to methodical or repetitive actions that accumulate into dense textures or patterns. Some artists leave marks raw and visible, preserving evidence of process, while others refine their marks into systems that blur the boundaries between drawing, painting, and sculpture.
“The works in the exhibition show that marks can operate as much more than just visual elements,” Turley said. “Some pieces communicate labor through repetition or the slow build-up of material, while others capture a quick, expressive gesture tied to emotion or movement.”
Mark-making is among the oldest artistic practices, extending from prehistoric cave drawings to contemporary digital forms, and spanning cultures across time. Artists have long used marks to record experience, map space, communicate ideas, and express emotion. By drawing attention to these elemental gestures, “Mark + Making” shifts focus from finished work to the processes that brought it into being.
Through this lens, Turley discovered new narratives between works that had never been shown together — shared rhythms, echoes of form and parallel approaches to experimentation.
“One of the most rewarding aspects of working with a collection-based exhibition is seeing all the new ways works can resonate with one another when they are brought into dialogue for the first time,” Turley said.
“Mark + Making” is organized by Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) and curated by Keshia Turley, assistant curator.
