About This Exhibition

A two-year
collaboration.
An extraordinary result.

The Unknowing Hand documents a remarkable two-year artistic collaboration between John Michaels, a special education art teacher, and Darren Murray, a nonverbal teenager on the autism spectrum. The exhibition opened September 25, 2010, and presented a body of portrait drawings that challenged assumptions about authorship, artistic intention, and the nature of creative expression.

Michaels developed a unique method: he would copy a reference image while Murray, seated alongside him, mirrored his hand movements — not copying the reference, but copying the teacher. The result is a body of work that carries the energy of both hands, both intentions, neither fully separate. Murray, working without the conscious apparatus of formal art training, brought something else to the drawings: directness, presence, and what Tom Christopher called “the natural gift of bringing out the personality of the subject.”

“He has the natural gift of bringing out the personality of the subject he is drawing — each one treated differently, to be accidental or a piece of luck.”

Tom Christopher  · Lift Trucks Art

The show was curated by Debra Browne and supported by the Westchester Exceptional Children’s School, a New York State-approved special education facility serving students ages 5–21. Neuroscience consultant Eric J. Moody of the University of Colorado provided scholarly context for the work, examining how Murray’s process related to current research on perception, motor cognition, and artistic expression in individuals with ASD.

The portraits — including studies after Shakespeare, Nat King Cole, and others — are not outsider art in the traditional sense, nor are they collaborative in the conventional one. They are something harder to categorize: the record of a specific relationship, rendered visible through drawing.