Pat Hickman | Tracks Spike | an exhibition

Pat Hickman
Track Spikes

Curated by Joe Fusaro

On View: September 7 – October 27
Ned Harris Gallery at Building 35

Opening Reception:
Saturday, September 7 | 7-9pm

Gallery Hours: Fridays * Saturdays * Sunday 2-5pm

Pat Hickman is a studio artist and professor emerita of art at the University of Hawaii. She has kept a studio at the GARNER Historic District since 2006 and is a recipient of a 2024 Artists’ Support Fund grant from the Arts Council of Rockland and the Rockland Community Foundation. Hickman’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Oakland Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Denver Art Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and Hawaii State Art Museum, among others. Her gate commission, Nets of Makali’i–Nets of the Pleiades, stands at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center in Hawaii.

I respond to place through what’s available to me as potential art materials– materials that to me hold history and meaning. So place comes into play. I live near the train. I want to play with the ideas and just think about how a material can be transformed. – Pat Hickman, Artist

With this exhibition, Pat Hickman traces a fading history of strength, labor, human connection, and travel through the creation of a site-specific installation of railroad track spikes in the Ned Harris Gallery. The exhibition will feature special events for school and community groups, as well as opportunities to engage with the artist and curator.

Pat Hickman’s work will make you literally lean forward to look closely at the material, the object, and the trace of that object’s form through ghostlike casts. The diligence with which each step of this process is considered is quite extraordinary. Details are just as satisfying as the whole. – Joe Fusaro, Curator

IMAGE CREDIT: Untitled (detail), by Pat Hickman