In the 1980s I worked in the picture frame shop of an art supply store, the Pierce Art Center, in Bloomington, Minnesota. At any given time there were six or eight young women and men employed in the art department and the frame shop. Mostly, they were talented, smart, quirky people.

There was a work surface in the frame shop used for assembling frames, cleaning glass, and cutting mats and foam board. The wooden tabletop was covered with a heavy cardboard that had a white surface. This work surface tended to wear with time and would be replaced periodically with a couple of new white sheets, cut to size, butted together, seams taped.

At one end of this table there was a stool and a telephone and workers would often take breaks and use the phone and maybe scribble or draw a bit. At some point, after I had been working at Pierce for about 5 years, we began to fill that work surface with vast, interconnecting collaborative drawings.

There are caricatures, scenes, vehicles, mechanisms, creatures, architecture, landscapes, poems, captions, patterns, blobs, designs, fantasy, science fiction, aliens, superheroes, gross anatomy, and the risqué. These doodles were predominantly silly and strange and often the result of a series of hijackings along the way - one artist co-opting the work of another, and so on. In the frame shop we would get regular visits from the talented art department cohort and making contributions to the sprawling drawings became routine for new employees and hangers-on alike.

In 1993 the frame shop was remodeled. The work table where we once let our minds flow was replaced with a much larger and higher one. The new management began to frown on that particular little frivolity we had relied on to lubricate our days.

We filled thirty-three 29 x 40 inch doodle boards between 1989 and 1993. During that time, when each doodle board ripened and was removed, I recorded its dates of creation as well as the roster of artists who collaborated on it. I then spirited it back to the warehouse and stored it with the others in an old matboard box. When I retired from the Pierce Art Center frame shop in 1995, the management made the suggestion that the box of doodle boards in the warehouse may belong to them. After a very short discussion the box left with me. Turns out I was the only person who thought the doodle boards were worth putting up a fuss about. And here we are.