Hear from artist and visual storyteller Wendy MacNaughton about her public art project, DrawTogether Strangers. Afterward, join Wendy in the East Building Atrium to draw someone you just met, and experience portraits in a new way. 

Wendy MacNaughton is an artist, visual storyteller, graphic journalist, and educator whose wide-ranging, boundary pushing work is rooted in a conviction that drawing, and the careful attention it requires of us, is an essential tool for creating human connection. Wendy is the author-illustrator of the books How to Say Goodbye, which grew out of her year-long artist’s residency at a pioneering California hospice facility, and Meanwhile in San Francisco, a first-of-its kind volume of visual journalism which leveraged her background in social work to chronicle overlooked and underrepresented stories hiding in plain sight in her hometown. She has also collaborated as an illustrator on numerous best-selling books, including Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat and The Gutsy Girl by Caroline Paul. As a visual columnist for The New York Times, The California Sunday Magazine and The Rumpus, Wendy spent years crisscrossing the continent in her “mobile studio” (built into the back of a Honda Element), chronicling idiosyncratic and often surprisingly poignant corners of American life, from a century-old, woman-owned knife-sharpening shop in Montana, to a community-building Black beekeeper in Oakland, to the military court proceedings at Guantanamo Bay.

Wendy is currently the Creator and “Drawer-in-Chief” of DrawTogether, a participatory drawing web series for kids which began, on the fly, during the earliest, most bewildering days of the pandemic and has rapidly expanded ever since. The enterprise now includes an educational nonprofit, DrawTogether Classrooms, which provides free social-emotional-learning and art curriculums to nearly 300,000 learners worldwide, and a weekly publication for adults, the DrawTogether Grown-Ups Table, which offers imaginative art exercises and wellness support to a hyper-engaged community of more than 55,000 subscribers.

In 2023, armed with nothing but a card table, two folding chairs and her own preternaturally ebullient willingness to chat up strangers on the street, Wendy launched DrawTogether Strangers, a one-woman, guerilla-style, interactive public art project which encourages pairs of random passerby to sit down, face to face, and spend a few minutes drawing portraits of each other. This project has blossomed into both a distillation and emphatic demonstration of Wendy’s core belief: that spontaneous, genuine connectedness can be sparked, even between perfect strangers, through the simple act of truly looking at one other.