DOWNTOWN LA

John Collins

Graven Images to the Major Deities

August 22 - September 12, 2026

Opening reception: Saturday, August 22, 6-9pm

Track 16 presents Los Angeles-based artist John Collins’s exhibition Graven Images to the Major Deities, which opens on Saturday, August 22, with a reception from 6:00 - 9:00 p.m. at its space in the Bendix Building in Downtown Los Angeles. Moonlight Graham is Collins’ daily regimented series of drawings that begins with the opening day of the baseball season and continues through the end of the World Series. This exhibition presents a selection of over 100 drawings from the 2025 season. 

In conjunction with the exhibition, Track 16 is releasing Moonlight Graham, a 284-page book covering 7 years of the project. It includes an essay by Ed Schad, who is a curator at The Broad in Los Angeles.

Collins’ daily process begins late each evening, when he chooses a play from one of the games played that day and depicts it with brushwork and ink washes on paper. When he began this daily devotional in 2019, each work was capped off by posting the image to Instagram. The series has evolved over multiple seasons. In 2025, he made a midseason replacement, swapping Arches, the classic French artist paper, for Asian rice and mulberry bark papers. Where the works on Arches paper are strongly evocative of something past, the Asian papers’ textures influence the looseness of the marks, making the work feel palpably in the moment. Also for this exhibit, Collins stepped into printmaking, creating a series of four drypoint prints looking at the last two games of the 2025 World Series. 

Besides being a play on words, the series name is also a nod to baseball history, as it’s lifted from Archibald Moonlight Graham, an early 20th-century player who was included in W. P. Kinsella’s novel, Shoeless Joe, which was later adapted into the film, Field of Dreams. Archibald received his nickname because he moonlit as a doctor during his playing days, which Collins found a nice parallel to his own project, which he’d tackle at night after his day job as a handyman. To further the fantasy akin to Kinsella’s novel, Collins fancied Moonlight Graham as a newspaper illustrator working on a fictional deadline as if his drawing would appear in the morning sports section next to the baseball scores and standings.

For inquiries, contact gallery@track16.com.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

John Collins is an artist and handyman residing in Los Angeles. He earned his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he focused on painting, drawing, and etching. His most well-known works are his nightly baseball drawing series, Moonlight Graham, which use brushwork and ink washes to depict a pivotal play every day for the duration of the 7-month baseball season. In 2021 Track 16 mounted the first exhibition of the Moonlight Graham series. For Collins, baseball transcends sport and lives in the realm of the spiritual. The size of the series has reached over a thousand.

Collins’s art practice outside of the baseball season reflects a brooding and introspective artist. His paintings are ruminations, documents of self-doubt. Collins writes, “In static equilibrium, I hope to gain access to repressed emotions through painting, even as I’m terrified of what will be exposed. The result is artwork that is seeking to hide itself.” He often works using non-traditional surfaces, salvaged materials from handyman jobs. They’re often figurative, autobiographical, and somewhat allegorical oil paintings on scraps of linoleum tile, chunks of stucco and concrete, and tattered bits of discarded fabric.