Collins’ baseball drawings are a regimented series that begins with the opening day of the baseball season and continues through the last game of the World Series. This exhibition presents a selection of over 100 drawings from the 2025 season. In conjunction with the exhibition, we’re releasing Moonlight Graham, a 284-page book covering 7 years of the project which includes an essay by Ed Schad, a curator at The Broad in Los Angeles.
Collins’ 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.
