David Schorr: Music as a Throughline

March 26 – May 9, 2026

Installed at Mary Ryan Gallery

Mary Ryan Gallery is pleased to announce Music as a Throughline, an exhibition of prints and works on paper by David Schorr (b. 1947, Chicago, IL – d. 2018, New York, NY). Lauded for his in-depth and multifaceted projects, Schorr explored diverse themes ranging from commedia dell’arte and music to the AIDS crisis and reminiscences of childhood. Encompassing beauty and sorrow, the works on view trace the musical themes that ran throughout Schorr’s oeuvre.

Schorr’s My Verdi (1979-1980) translated his obsessive love of opera into a series of prints depicting twelve Verdi operas. Schorr had a deep appreciation for the history of printmaking and drawing, and incorporated historic and rarely used techniques into his practice, such as silverpoint, engraving, and chine collé. These prints are his homage to the great Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) and include details that opera lovers will appreciate. For example, in La Traviata, Schorr inventively uses Verdi’s lyrics to form Alfredo’s shadow and Violetta’s dress in their famous duet. My Verdi is being shown at Mary Ryan Gallery for the first time since it was created 45 years ago.

One work on view is from Schorr’s Songs with a Dying Fall series, created as a lament for his many friends whose lives were cut short by AIDS. Like much of Schorr’s work, this drawing incorporates text, here from Mark Helprin’s novel A Soldier of the Great War. The beauty of their bodies is at odds with the elegiac mood of the words. The phrase “dying fall” comes from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and refers to a descrescendo.

Also on view are gouache paintings from the artist’s Apothecary series, depicting antique apothecary bottles with imagined contents – in this selection, references to abstract musical concepts. Schorr was a fan of classical music and opera as well as Broadway tunes and pop music – Nowadays references a song from the musical Chicago. Meticulously executed in gouache and silverpoint on luxurious, colored Fabriano Roma papers, these paintings reveal bottles floating mysteriously, oblivious to gravity. Phyllis Rose wrote, “Sometimes I find myself thinking that the bottles of Apothecary represent nothing so orderly as an emotional inventory; they are at the same time the flotsam and jetsam of a very cultivated, poetry-loving, opera-loving, and music-loving mind.”

David Schorr (b. 1947, Chicago, IL – d. 2018, New York, NY) was an American artist whose works span painting, drawing, printmaking, illustration, and bookmaking. He began teaching at Wesleyan University in 1971 and instructed a wide range of courses including printmaking, drawing, typography, book design, graphic design, and calligraphy for nearly five decades. In 2015, he received the Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching. He was a Fulbright scholar three times, in Italy in 1975 and India in 1998 and 2001.

Mary Ryan Gallery has held eight exhibitions of Schorr’s work between 1986 and 2017. Each of his solo exhibitions was accompanied by an artist’s book designed by Schorr. Paul Monette, Phyllis Rose, Richard Howard, Judith Thurman, Stephen Greenblatt, and Jonathan Galassi wrote essays for his artist books.

Schorr was commissioned for major murals and posters by the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Opera, the Montreal Opera, Scaramouche restaurant in Toronto, Verdi restaurant in Santa Monica, and many other private and public institutions.

His work is held in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University, CT; Fogg Museum at Harvard University, MA; Israel Museum, Israel; Morgan Library and Museum, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Gallery, Washington, DC; New York Public Library, NY; and the Yale University Art Gallery, CT.