Dot, Dash, Dissolve: Drawn from the JoAnn Gonzalez Hickey Collection

Dot, Dash, Dissolve features selections from the JoAnn Gonzalez Hickey collection made by students in PAFA’s fall 2015 Advanced Drawing seminar led by curator Robert Cozzolino, and artist/faculty member Astrid Bowlby. As the course progressed, the students brought their studio experience, class discussions, and experience with original artwork and the broader art world to shape their choices. Students established a relationship with Hickey and explored her collection, an invitation made possible through her SYZYGY curatorial platform for study. The result is an unusual curatorial project full of discovery.

The unique nature of Hickey’s collection, unified by paper as a medium for marks made by a wide range of methods, provoked our class to consider the seemingly straightforward question, “What is drawing?” As students examined their own assumptions about the role of drawing in their studios they found new questions provoked by works in Hickey’s collection. This exhibition is, in part, a response to our question about drawing’s possibilities.