One artist’s response to the surging Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 has become an ongoing project, an excerpt of which is now in the Regier Art Gallery.
“The Pandemic Portraits” is a collection of drawings on newspaper by printmaker and painter Nicholas Hill of Granville, Ohio.
“The Pandemic Portraits” is currently in the gallery in Luyken Fine Arts Center at Bethel through Dec. 7. Gallery hours are Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday, 2-4 p.m. There is no admission charge.
The exhibit reception (Hill will not be present) is Nov. 14 from 6-7 p.m. at the gallery.
In early 2020, Hill began to see headlines in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal about a virus that was quickly overwhelming the world.
In late February, Hill began a daily practice of drawing portraits, using a bamboo brush and India ink, on pages from those two newspapers where pandemic-related headlines appeared above the fold.
The portraits were of specific, though unidentified, people Hill found in photos in the same papers.
“As the pandemic took hold in the United States, an early statistics stated that one American was dying every five minutes,” Hill says in his artist statement. “I used that number to inform my process. I limited myself to a maximum of five minutes for each portrait.”
The medium and drawing tools create “direct, bold marks that cannot be corrected,” he says. “Mistakes happen. They are part of the drawings, too. The immediacy of the process acknowledges the urgency of the pandemic.
“Now, almost five years after the onset of [Covid-19], I continue to draw. The drawings are fewer in number as the headlines occur less frequently. I have completed over 5,500 drawings as of September 2024.”
Hill is a 2017 Guggenheim fellow who has exhibited his work and been awarded residencies in Chile, India, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and Poland.
His work is represented in more than 50 public collections including the United States Department of State, the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the New York Historical Society and the Library of Congress.
After receiving his M.F.A. degree from the University of Iowa, where he studied printmaking with Mauricio Lasansky, Hill had an extensive teaching career at the State University of New York, Union College in New York, Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kan., where he was chair of the art department, and Otterbein University in Ohio.
In 2025, Hill plans to return to Chile and Portugal to offer printmaking workshops and to exhibit his work.
Bethel is a four-year liberal arts college founded in 1887 and is the oldest Mennonite college in North America. Bethel was the first Kansas college or university to be named a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Center, in 2021. For more information, see http://www.bethelks.edu
