How it started…

I’ve been obsessed with certain niches of later 19th-century British and European art since I was a teenager, collecting more monetarily-accessible etchings, photogravures and the like, but when a cache of American WPA artwork in need of attention lands in one’s vicinity, one pivots in response.

The grandfather of my partner - Will Romanelli - was the artist William “Bill” Hicks, and we’ve been living with some of the work already. One of my ‘pandemic projects’ was reframing and archive re-matting the prints on the wall, and the ideas for this website project were already forming and being discussed with Will's siblings Alice in Australia and Peter in Cape Cod. Things were sped up when Peter unfortunately passed in the spring of this year, and a trove of Hick’s work and ephemera and further research leads were encountered by us dealing with his estate.

So here I am, getting to live my art-history-college-thesis/Antiques Roadshow/Fake or Fortune fantasy. I dropped out of college after a couple of years in the 90’s to take the photography route, and though I do not regret that, like any industry, eventually things change and I find myself looking for something more lucrative and steady - you know, with benefits! Until I work that situation out, this project has been a lovely, exciting distraction where I get to play in the art world, putting my name on something and at the same time making sure someone else’s name is not forgotten. There were about 10,000 WPA artists, and each one has a story - this website and book project tells one of those stories.

In this blog section I will be posting odds-and-ends relative to this project.