Peter Drake’s art has been featured in 28 Solo exhibitions and his work is held in numerous private, corporate and public collections throughout the US, China and Europe including the Whitney Museum of Art, Phoenix Museum of Art, MOCA LA, Weatherspoon Art Museum and the L.A. County Museum of Art, among others.

Peter Drake is a painter whose work is monumental, playful and uncanny. Whether depicting moments of everyday life or miniature toys, working in full technicolor or subtractively (sanding away at the surface), Drake thinks of his paintings as Giotto meets Vermeer on the way to David Lynch's house.

Drake's Waiting for Toydot, a MTA Arts & Design permanent public art commission for the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) Massapequa Station opened to the public in 2015. Waiting for Toydot features 18 art glass windows and 5 ceramic/glass mosaics installed throughout the train station and is seen by over 6,000 commuters daily.

He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a New York Foundation Fellowship and is a two-time recipient of the Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Program Grant. Drake maintains a studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn and is represented by Linda Warren Projects, Chicago & Los Angeles, Healy Contemporaneo, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and Craighead Green Gallery, Dallas.

His work has been written about in Art in America, Artpulse, (t)here Magazine, Newsday, BmoreArt, Flash Art, Interview, The New York Times, Art & Antiques, Artists Magazine, Huffington Post, Time Out, Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists, Art at Eaton Center, The Figure, New York’s Underground Art Museum: MTA Arts & Design, Launching Your Art Career: A Practical Guide for Artists, Become a Great Artist and Contemporary Art Underground.

Drake actively lectures and curates. Curatorial projects include We Are Family co-curated with Clifford Owens, Figurative Diaspora: The Migration of Academic Training from Russia to China in the Service of Progressive Art, co-curated with Mark Tansey, Piss and Vinegar: Two Generations of Provocateurs, co-curated with George Adams, Beautiful Beast, a contemporary representational sculpture exhibition, The Big Picture, and Now and Then: Drawings from the 19th Century to the Present, in partnership with the Dahesh Museum of Art. Drake previously was a curator for The Drawing Center in New York City and wrote for Flash Art Magazine.

He serves on the Advisory Committee for the Weil Art Exchange based in Mallorca, Spain and served as a board member of the Artist Fellowship, Inc. from 2015-18. He was a jurist for Base Istanbul 2017, the AXA Art Prize 2018-2024 and was a juror for the second Velazquez Global Painting and Sculpture Competition.

Drake is presently the Provost at the New York Academy of Art, a progressive figurative and representational graduate program in lower Manhattan and he continues as a MFA Thesis Advisor having taught previously at Parsons the New School for Design, SVA, and MICA.

Peter Drake was born and raised in Garden City, Long Island and lives in Manhattan.

Dovecote and Glistening Artist Statement

My interest in toy imagery stems from a collection of metal toys that my father collected throughout his life.

My father may have been nostalgic about his childhood and may have wanted to recapture some aspect of it, but I also believe that he recognized that there was a historical gravitas in the toys. When you pick them up it’s hard not to be aware of their weight. They don’t feel like contemporary toys and they look like little sculptures more than playthings.

These miniature metal toys have been tossed around in their lives and if you collect them you become aware of how they age; always finding little chips of lost paint at the bottom of any box that you pack them in.

Battered, but still standing, the lead toys in Glistening are surrogates for an idealized world. Two toy dogs stand guard, being brave, curious, and indefatigable as protectors as they are there to do their jobs.

 A dovecote by definition is a structure to house doves or pigeons and once was seen as a status symbol of an estate or manor. My Dovecote finds it home in a suburban setting complete with a precise hedge and a perfectly manicured lawn.

The painting techniques that I employ are largely 17th and 18th century indirect techniques, but with acrylic paint. I like that I can do thousands of glazes a day which gives the work a unique luminosity and as a result the pockmarks and divots become jewel like.

- Peter Drake