Larissa Fassler’s large-scale diagrammatic drawings focus on society’s failure to assist people who are at the margins: the unhoused, people living below the poverty line, and, in this particular case, those also impacted by the opioid crisis. These works make the routes to poverty visible. They mirror hard images of a community back to itself. The facts are known—statistics for poverty, opioid use, dropouts, healthcare costs—but the drawings are a call to action to highlight them all in one place. In the case of Manchester, public space is completely dysfunctional due to the dominance of car culture, the scourge of parking lots, poverty, and an opioid crisis that leaves people who are struggling with housing, mental illness, and addiction to languish in parks and transit hubs. Societies suffer without well-designed and maintained public spaces. Well-functioning public space can form a sense of togetherness and foster ongoing relations, it can combat inequality and polarization, and it can encourage everyone to find ways to know and help one another. Fassler’s work strives to make these issues visible, serving as an advocate for the urgent necessity of well-designed and inclusive public spaces.

Manchester, NH, USA I-IV was researched while Fassler was artist-in-residence at the Currier Museum of Art. Completed during the residency, the original large-scale drawing series was made with pen, pencil, and colored pencil crayons, and was executed on unmounted paper. The series is now part of the Currier’s permanent collection. Here, facsimile prints—fiber/rag inkjet print on Alu-Dibond—are displayed at the scale of the original hand drawings.

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Poggi