With a 2025-2026 research support grant from the WVU Humanities Center, Professor Dylan Collins spent June 2025 participating in a digital stone carving residency in the northern part of Tuscany, Italy.
The residency brought together a diverse, international cohort of studio artists, architects, designers, and students. Collins, who normally works with metal, used this residency to create a marble sculpture based on manipulated imagery from the dollar bill.
While marble sculpting was a new experience for him, Collins used this residency to develop the conceptual approach that has defined his research and artistic style for many years. Collins takes familiar and everyday objects and transforms them with fantastical dimensions, unexpected distortions, and surreal, dreamlike qualities.
The sculpture Collins created during this residency, Currency, subverts and challenges symbols related to our national identity. Collins used symbols from the dollar bill “because the buildings, animals, and landscape features that help define our country’s character also provide insight into the fissures and disconnects present in the contemporary United States. In the Anthropocene age, truth is often stranger than fiction, and I seek to put a fine point on the inevitable changes and transformation of our once familiar belief systems as seemingly fictional scripts play out due to climate change, social strife, and various other 21st century upheavals.”
Another novel aspect of this experience for Collins was that prior to arriving in Tuscany, he had already created a 3-D image of his sculpture on his computer at WVU. Before heading to Italy, he sent the image ahead. Meanwhile, a giant slab of marble was cut to Collins’ specifications by a robot in Italy. A rough cut of the sculpture was on a table waiting to be perfected by Collins during the residency when he arrived.
Asked if this was “cheating,” Collins explained that artists generate the ideas and transform the material into its perfected, final product. If Michaelangelo or Donatello had this technology available to them, Collins insists they would have taken advantage of it. He also stressed all of the artistic work that goes into creating the image and the month of detailed finishing, polishing, and perfecting he did with his own tools and hands. Collins also noted that the artistic process is often far more complex than many of us imagine.
Many artists have enormous help from people who never even get credit for their part in the production of the artwork. In fact, some artists never actually touch their own artwork. Lots of juicy philosophical questions to ponder, but that’s for another time. Collins’ sculpture traveled from Italy to Morgantown and will be on display in the fall 2026 studio art faculty exhibit in the Canady Creative Arts Center’s Laura and Paul Mesaros Galleries.
Dylan Collins has been teaching at WVU since 2008, and he loves it here. He especially loves working with his incredible students. He appreciates all of the diversity in terms of sense of place. Our students come all the way from the hills and hollers of Appalachia to the New Jersey suburbs. People with these vastly different experiences all come together with shared goals on our campus.
Dylan and his two younger brothers grew up with artistic and hardworking parents who encouraged their freedom and creativity. The boys spent their childhood building forts, making art, being pyromaniacs, and throwing dirt clods at each other. He describes his home environment as a “magical place, surrounded by artists, anti-nuke activists, and free thinkers.”
These days, Dylan, his wife Jo, and their dogs love to spend time enjoying the natural beauty of West Virginia. Dylan loves to cook with a light touch, using freshly picked in-season ingredients. He also loves reading, gardening, and BBQ.