Publication Preview: "Josefina Auslender: Drawing Myself Free"

Published in conjunction with the retrospective exhibition Josefina Auslender: Drawing Myself Free, on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) from December 11, 2025–May 31, 2026, this eponymous book offers the first comprehensive survey of work by the Argentine-born artist Josefina Auslender.  Despite Auslender’s prolific output of drawings in graphite, colored pencil, and ink, Auslender has received disproportionately little attention by critics, scholars, and art institutions.

This survey of Auslender's artistic career, published by Scala in collaboration with BCMA, spans decades and continents, conveying the artist’s lifelong passion for creating new worlds through art using visual languages of Surrealism and abstraction. By connecting key moments in her professional with global events, the text examines issues of gender, war, grief, trauma, and diaspora—and how we all, in our own ways, grapple with feelings of isolation and connection, otherness and belonging.

Edited by Cassandra Mesick Braun, curator of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, this volume of essays  features an oral history history interview with the artist and additional contributions from Sarah Bouchard, Véronique Plesch, Daniel R. Quiles, and Pilar Saavedra-Weiss.

Josefina Auslender: Drawing Myself Free will be released in September 2026, and will be available for purchase through the Bowdoin College Museum of Art Shop, online or in person. To be notified when the publication is available, please email artmuseum@bowdoin.edu to be added to the waitlist.