Throwback Thursday! In 1997, Tacita Dean came to The Drawing Center to start The Roaring Forties: Seven Boards in Seven Days, one of several chalkboard series that evoke the aesthetic of black and white cinema. As the title suggests, Dean worked every day over a one-week period at our premises and completed a sequence of white chalk drawings on 8ft x 8ft panels prepared with blackboard paint. The Roaring Forties refers to a zone in the southern Atlantic noted for its treacherous winds. Dean’s drawings unfold an epic sea narrative in seven parts that includes scenes depicting a storm, a ship fighting with the wind and muscled sailors rowing a skiff for survival. The series, with its dramatic representations of subjects in action, draws associations between storytelling in the language of the cinematic storyboard and drawing. The connection to film narrative is accentuated by the hand-written directorial notations that punctuate these scenes, allowing the viewer to construct a sequence ...