Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Helzer Gallery Presents “The First Writing,” a Drawing Invitational Exhibition

Photos and Story by Alfredo V. Moreno

The Helzer Gallery at Portland Community College’s Rock Creek Campus is hosting “The First Writing,” a comprehensive exhibition of drawings curated by PCC art instructor Mark Andres. The work will be on view from Oct. 8 through Nov. 1. The public is invited to a reception to meet the artists from noon to 1 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 31. Admission is free.

Andres was inspired to organize the show by Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi, who once said, “the first writing by the human being was drawing.” It was Andres’ intention to bring together a diverse group of artists for whom, according to the art faculty, “drawing remains a primal means of communication: one parallel to written language, but a pre-verbal 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, college instructors, and artists from throughout the world (click here for a complete list). They are, according to Andres, 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.”

“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,” he said.