The Puppet Drawings are among the most significant works on paper Kentridge has produced. Made in connection with his film Shadow Procession, created for the 1999 Istanbul Biennial, they take figures observed on the streets of Johannesburg or seen in newspaper photographs; Kentridge built paper puppets from torn black paper joined with wire, filmed them in stop motion, and then produced this suite of related drawings by attaching singular puppet forms to vintage atlas pages. Here, the background is a 19th century French map of North America, Carte de L'Amérique Septentrionale par Delamarche, 1838, its geographic content and colonial cartographic authority present beneath the gesture. The puppet figure rendered in Kentridge's distinctive black collage, all angularity and improvised structure, moves across the continent as if migrating. In augmenting the puppet with a vintage map, Kentridge amplifies the figure's reference to migrants, refugees, and displaced persons, the movement of peoples across territories charted and claimed by others. The series is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and institutions across Europe and the United States.