Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

The First Writing, a Drawing Invitational Exhibition

Rock Creek Helzer Gallery

• Exhibition on view: October 8 – November 1, 2018
• Opening reception: Wednesday, October 31, from 12-1pm

The Helzer Gallery at Portland Community College’s Rock Creek campus is pleased to present The First Writing. This show is a comprehensive exhibition of drawings curated by PCC Art Instructor Mark Andres.

The statement by Marjane Satrapi, “The first writing by the human being was drawing,” inspired Curator Mark Andres to conceive of The First Writing exhibition. It was Andres’ intention to bring together a diverse group of artists for whom “drawing remains a primal means of communication: one parallel to written language, but a preverbal one which ties these artists to the ancestral caves and to the mysteries of looking before the world was named.”

The artists invited to show their work in The First Writing are a range of local artists, Portland Community College instructors, and artists from throughout the world. They are united by a “common love of drawing,” and “share common desire to communicate not with words, numbers, bits or photos, but with objects made directly by human hands,” according to Andres.

Participating artists include

I hope the range of the exhibition, which includes depiction, invention, diagram, abstraction, materiality, and narrative, offers the viewer a sense of the diversity of perceptual and conceptual tools at the heart of what we identify as drawing. Andres