The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a heavy toll on the country’s artistic community. Shuttered venues and taped-off galleries have deprived artists and consumers alike of the joys of intimate, in-person artistic experiences. 

Last week, the pandemic claimed its latest victim in the artistic world, forcing the cancellation of a long-awaited Georgetown University exhibition showcasing Lauinger library’s most spectacular love sticks. The exhibit, part of the school’s “Dings & Dongs: A History of Doors and Dicks in Post-9/11 America” series, hoped to celebrate the library’s most impressive penis drawings and carvings. 

“This was supposed to be my breakthrough, man,” a dejected Richard Polla (COL’22) told The Heckler. “Now all those hours I spent drawing dicks on Lau 4 cubicles feel like a waste of time.” 

Polla, a self-proclaimed member of the “dickpressionist” school and treasurer of the Georgetown University Penis Portrait Association (GUPPA) hoped to kick start his artistic career by showing off his work to the pubic—sorry, public. 

“I’d say my coolest drawing was this one where I used the eight from a phone number as the sack and just built off of it,” Polla said. “It was totally visionary.” 

Georgetown is not the only American university whose house of knowledge is embellished with phalluses. Harvard’s Widener library boasts the oldest known library dick drawing in America. Princeton’s Firestone library houses, among other classics, a 1969 rendition of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup can, where the can is just a penis wrapped in the Campbell’s label.

“This exhibition was a chance for Georgetown to make a name for itself in the collegiate dick drawing community; now we’re back at square one,” Todd Ger (SFS’21), GUPPA’s president, told The Heckler. “Those Ivy League jerks think their dicks are so much better than ours — we’ll show ‘em one day.”