James Drake was born in Lubbock, Texas in 1946. He received his BFA in 1969 and MFA in 1970 from Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, California. He moved to New York City from El Paso, Texas, where he lived and worked for over twenty years.
Drake presented his figurative, narrative art internationally, receiving early critical praise for his dramatic steel sculptures, drawings, photographs and video installations. In the process, he has deployed a consistent vocabulary of images relating to art history, weaponry, the fine line between savagery and civilization, the human urge to communicate, the semiotic capacities of our words and gestures, and life on the densely populated bilingual Juarez-El Paso border. Drake characterizes himself as a narrative artist, albeit one who is more interested in vignettes and fragments than in storytelling.
Today Drake's work is in the permanent collections of over thirty museums, including the Albright-Knox Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He has had over sixty one-person shows and has been invited to participate in more than one hundred group exhibitions. Drake has been included in the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial and is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants.
Today Drake lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.