In the Spring Semester of 1995 ANTHONY DEL RIO was co-recipient of an independent study award. He made a cross country trip pulling a trailer housing a traveling exhibition of strange drawings, concentrating on non designated, non art specific locations, including parks, camp grounds, fair grounds, and mall parking lots. The artist traveled throughout the country interviewing retired and practicing show folk, documenting stories of their experiences in the outdoor amusement industry. What surfaced were accounts of a way of life that is long since changed and deteriorated at the hands of a stifling and regulating government. This, along with technical advances in the entertainment business and a waning public interest, have aided the disintegration of this subculture and its departure from the context of its original magnificence. The soul of the American Carnival is no longer fantastic, it is restrained by an absurd antiseptic mentality. Several of Del Rio's images are a direct result of these truths, and serve as retreats to little hiding places, where people are more real and less confused. Other pieces were created in anticipation of the distance he was to travel and the people he would meet along the way. Anthony Del Rio's work is representative of a search for hero/antihero characteristics, and the values they depict. Once there were days when whiskey was cheaper to drink than milk and safer to drink than water. These drawings exist only as homage to those days, to those people, now intangible and inanimate, and to the ideas and causes for which they lived.

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