By 1808Delaware
When Ohio Wesleyan University’s Richard M. Ross Art Museum reopens after its summer closure, visitors will encounter two exhibitions considering how individuals and nations remember difficult, defining moments.
The museum, located at 60 S. Sandusky Street in Delaware, will reopen Tuesday, August 11, with Nicholas Hill: Pandemic Portraits. Two days later, the companion exhibition Reflections of America at 250 will formally open with a public reception from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM Thursday, August 13. Together, the exhibitions place an intensely personal record of the COVID-19 pandemic alongside a broader examination of the people, places, histories, and ideals that have shaped the United States.
Five Minutes at a Time
Artist and printmaker Nicholas Hill began Pandemic Portraits in late February 2020, as reports of a rapidly spreading virus began accumulating across the pages of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Hill, a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow who taught for many years at Otterbein University, responded by establishing a daily artistic practice. Using India ink and a bamboo brush, he drew portraits directly onto newspaper pages carrying pandemic-related headlines above the fold.
Each portrait was completed in no more than five minutes. The limit reflected a statistic frequently reported during the early stages of the crisis: At one point, an American was dying from COVID-19 approximately every five minutes.
The people depicted in Hill’s work are specific individuals whose photographs appeared in the newspapers, but they remain unidentified in the finished drawings. Removed from their original captions and circumstances, the faces become part of a larger record of collective anxiety, grief, isolation, and loss. What began as a response to unfolding headlines grew into an extensive visual archive. By September 2024, Hill had completed approximately 5,500 portraits. A published catalog presents a selection of 105 works from the series.
The Ross Art Museum describes the exhibition as a deeply personal reflection on grief, memory, and loss during the pandemic. The drawings also preserve something increasingly distant from daily life: the physical newspaper pages through which millions of people first encountered the scale of the emergency.
An Artist With an International Reach
Hill earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa, where he studied under influential printmaker Mauricio Lasansky. His work has taken him well beyond Ohio. Hill has exhibited and participated in residencies in Chile, India, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Poland. His art is represented in more than 50 public collections, including those of the U.S. Department of State, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the New-York Historical Society, and the Library of Congress.
Pandemic Portraits brings that international experience to a subject that was simultaneously global and deeply intimate. Although the drawings emerged from a crisis shared across continents, each work begins with a single human face.
Looking at America From Ohio
Opening alongside Hill’s exhibition is Reflections of America at 250, a juried group exhibition organized by the Ross Art Museum in partnership with the Ohio Art League. The exhibition coincides with the United States’ 250th anniversary and asks Ohio artists to examine the country as both an inherited idea and a continuing work in progress.
Participating artists were invited to respond to the people, places, ideals, histories, and experiences that have shaped the nation. Work in painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media, and other forms was eligible for consideration.
The organizers welcomed both celebratory and critical interpretations, allowing artists to explore national identity without requiring a single conclusion about what America has been or what it should become. Entries were juried by Ross Art Museum Director Christopher A. Yates in collaboration with the Ohio Art League Board. Artists could submit as many as three pieces, with eligible works required to have been completed within the past four years.
The exhibition’s opening reception will be held from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM August 13 at the museum.
Two Exhibitions, One Larger Conversation
Although Pandemic Portraits and Reflections of America at 250 developed independently, their simultaneous presentation creates a natural conversation. Hill’s drawings document a concentrated period when daily statistics became measures of individual lives. The Ohio Art League exhibition takes a wider view, considering the experiences, conflicts, achievements, and unresolved questions accumulated over 250 years.
One exhibition asks how a society remembers thousands of people lost during a shared emergency. The other asks how a nation understands its history while continuing to define itself.
Beginning August 13, visitors to the Ross Art Museum will be able to experience both exhibitions during a single visit, marking the museum’s return from its summer closure with works focused on remembrance, identity, and the human stories behind history.
