These paired exhibitions featured “Estimating Pitch Location” (1991–96), a drawing series by Janet Cohen, and “The Argument Drawings,” a collaborative project initiated by Cohen, Keith Frank, and Jon Ippolito in 1995. Cohen’s drawings diagram the estimated locations where pitches cross the front plane of the strike zone and the results of actual pitches. Cohen has described them as “pictures of how pitchers think about placing pitches, and what happens to a thought when it is subjected to repetition and years of experience.”
In contrast, Cohen’s collaborations with Frank and Ippolito consisted of the artists’ impromptu responses to such provocative statements as “organized religion is antithetical to a free-thinking society.” Driving the directional development of the work-in-progress was the tripartite trajectory of three competing opinions. The result of a few rounds of conversational exchange was a skirmish-like diagram labeled with three sets of initials, an agreement to disagree, and, typically, a new statement to be embraced, countered, or negated.