Create an Exquisite Corpse for display in the Camden National Bank Community Gallery at the Downtown Branch of the Portland Public Library.  In conjunction with our NonSense: Collaboration on Spontaneous Composition exhibit, we’re inviting artists to create collaborative drawings with friends and fellow artists.  We’re encouraging artists to gather, in the spirit of the Surrealists, to play the game of Exquisite Corpse and create collaborative, nonsensical drawings.  Community members are encouraged to deliver any Exquisite Corpse collaborative drawings to the Children's desk at the downtown Branch and we’ll display them in the Camden National Bank Community Gallery during the months of November and December.

Please include the following on the back of the framed or unframed pieces of art: Full names of all contributing artists, an email address and phone number of who to contact to get the work back when the exhibit ends.  We will do our best to return artwork in January 2026.  Portland Public Library is not responsible for lost or damaged artwork.

How to play Exquisite Corpse

1. Take a piece of paper and fold it into three equal parts.
2. Draw, paint, or collage on the top section of the paper creating the “head” of the corpse.
3. Fold the paper over your image to conceal it. Extend the lines of the “neck” over the edge of the folded paper so that the next artist can connect their image to yours and create the “body” on the middle section of the paper.
4. Pass the paper to the next artist while keeping your image hidden.  The next artist will add the “body” in the middle section of the paper leaving a few lines from the “body” visible over the fold of the third section of paper for the last artists to create the “legs”.
5. Pass the paper to the third artist keeping the “head” and “body” concealed. The third artists then draws the “legs”.
6. Now it’s time to unfold the paper completely and see what was created.

About the exhibit

NonSense: Collaboration on Spontaneous Composition revisits the game of “Exquisite Corpse,” created by Surrealist artists in the years after World War I as a playful way to communicate the absurdities of a chaotic time. Those collaborative drawings and writings were whimsical and surreal, with each artist aware only of their contribution of one-third of the overall piece until the unveiling.

With this exhibit, we hope to evoke the illogical, the absurd, and the irrational — things Surrealism championed.  We asked illustrators, editorial artists and writers – whose work appears everywhere from children’s books to novels to the pages of newspapers and magazines – to create whatever came to mind when the paper, or digital screen was in front of them. Each artist and writer in the exhibit worked off small fragments of where the previous contributor left off or left small fragments for the next contributor to work from.

We like to imagine the community created between Surrealist artists as they sat around tables late into the night merging their ideas on paper. Although we couldn’t invite everybody to share that same kind of physical space, we saw this as an opportunity to create community amongst artists whose work explores this same terrain.