Among the drawings featured in “The Pencil Is a Key: Drawings by Incarcerated Artists” are a series of holiday greeting cards from the Soviet Gulag. The anonymous drawings were collected by a prisoner named Irina Ugrimova while she was detained at Minlag, a special labor camp for political prisoners within the Gulag system. . The Gulag was a network of forced-labor camps formed by the USSR that operated from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. Prisoners were sentenced without trial to perform grueling labor under brutal conditions of cold weather and starvation.The Gulag camps were not fully abolished until after 1950, by which point historians estimate that between two and six million people had been either killed or fatally overworked by the camp system. . “The Pencil Is a Key: Drawings by Incarcerated Artists” is on view in our Main Gallery and Drawing Room until January 5, 2020. Throughout the run of the exhibition, admission to The Drawing Center will be FREE (Wed - Sun, 12pm - 6pm...