Past and Future Travels of Here Right Now (300 Drawings) Drop at Arvada Library

This afternoon, Art Drop Arvada headed to Arvada Library and hid 12 prints from artist Emily Grace King's series Past and Future Travels of Here Right Now (300 Drawings) at Arvada Library. Technically only 11 were hidden--the 12th print was given to the lovely library worker who gave us her blessing to tuck little art presents between beloved books.

Check out all 300 of the drawings from the series, or read below for more on Past and Future Travels of Here Right Now. If you are a lucky Hunter who scored one of the hidden pieces, make sure to share a picture of your find and tag Arvada Art Drop. We would love to see your treasure!

Past and Future Travels of Here Right Now is a collection of 300 drawings created over one year. 

My family went on a lot of road trips when I was a kid—a flowing view of mountains, trees, farm, clouds, and hills punctuated with cities, power plants, highways, and the ever-connecting power lines passed by my mini-van window (of which I was ordered to stare out, and my sister ordered to stare out of hers). The power lines were as certain as the road before us, drawing long parallels from one rest stop to the next.

Even deep in the mountains it was impossible to take a photo of the scenic land without catching a telephone pole or electric wires in the viewfinder. Human construction runs to the core of our earth—can it ever be escaped to see the beauty without our created structures? And yet this interruption of nature connects us with each other across great distances, across mountains and oceans, across space. 

In each voyage or errand-running drive, my surroundings became the drawings. After seeing the launching of the space shuttle, the scene quickly became a popular theme. The oil spilling into the ocean near my home spilled into the drawings. At a Christmas in Boston I began adding snow.

The rocketship soon meant more to me than other elements. The icon and history of US space travel is one of phenomenal power, exploration, and industry to our nation, and I have admired it from a young age. The rocketship became something very different as the natural story of the drawings progressed, representing necessary and desperate escape as much as freedom.

Although many drawings show present and past land, cloud, and cityscapes, a future is also displayed. Planets of energy production machines to support the planets filled with cities; worlds too mountainous to inhabit; the constant growth of the constructed into the created.

(spoiler alert: I am both the creator of Art Drop Arvada and the artist for our first art drop, which feels a little silly. But I figure we have to start somewhere, and before recruiting other local artists I need to have a few successful drops under my belt).

​- Emily