Comic Art Show Article in Fall IJOCA

Catalog cover featuring Warhol's Dick Tracy.

My article about the Comic Art Show, which was at the Whitney Museum's downtown gallery in 1983, has finally been published in the International Journal of Comic Art (Vol 14, No. 2, Fall 2012). I thank the following people for sharing their memories, giving me input on my numerous drafts, or other assistance:

John Carlin, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, Sheena Wagstaff, Ann Philbin, Brian Walker, Leonard Rifas, Denise Lederman, Kristen Leipert, Marc H. Greenberg, John Lent, and the Frances Mulhall Achilles Library and Archive at the Whitney.
  
The IJOCA's articles are not published on-line.Here's a link to a (legible, but not fabulous) pdf scan of the article.

Wagstaff Moves to the Met

Photo of the Whitney at Night by Ezra Stoller/Esto;
from the Whitney's web site. See more about
the Breuer building here.

As part of my on-going research about The Comic Art Show, which was one of the first major exhibitions of comics as art at the Whitney's downtown gallery in the summer of 1983, I interviewed Sheena Wagstaff, who co-curated the show with John Carlin as part of the Whitney's Independent Study Program. Eventually she became Chief Curator at the Tate in London. I just read in the March edition of ArtNews that she is taking over as head of the Modern Art department of the Metropolitan Museum in New York.  By an odd coincidence, most of the Met's modern collection is moving over to the Whitney's iconic Marcel Breuer building, as the Whitney will be moving into their new Renzo Piano designed building in the meatpacking district.

I plan to incorporate this story into my final draft, along with info about the recent Feininger show, and finally complete and publish my research on this show over the next couple of months (honest :-)

Cartoon Art Museum brings Fridgeland to the SFPL

A guick post about Fridgeland and Art is Your Voice, Speak Up!, two inspired animations by high school students on display at the Teen Center at the SF Public Library.  Cartoon Art Museum - Talking Points is an after school cartoon and animation training program for students from SF high schools. In the two part class, the students learn scripting and traditional animation techniques, and then learn storyboarding, character design, and how to use software such as Illustrator, PhotoShop and Flash to assemble a short cartoon.

On display at the library were some of the character designs and working drawings for the two cartoons, which were shown on an "antique" monitor/console set-up near-by.  The cartoons were also playing with the sound off, because the voices "disturbed the patrons," although it seems like a simple headset would have solved this problem.  Still, the narrative flow of the stories were clear enough to allow me to follow the plots without dialog, along with a little help from a friendly librarian in that department.

Art is Your Voice, Speak Up! is a simple tale of a shy young boy being inspired by other characters to sing at an audition.  The animation was simple, yet imaginative, and owed much to the Cartoon Network/Farmville Flash game style of animation.  Fridgeland (character at left), the piece created by the more advanced students, is a Toy Story-like tale of food items coming to life while the fridge is closed. These characters, such as a talking slice of cake, Chinese take-out cartons, and various veggies and bottles, all had a hand-drawn quality reminiscent of the style of Yellow Submarine and the Blue Meanies. This animation included a small amount of live action to frame the story, including a scene of the homeowners playing cards in the kitchen unaware of the battle of the condiments going on 3 feet away inside the fridge. I will never look at BBQ sauce and Thousand Island dressing the same way again. On the whole, both animations successfully held my interest, and James Scott Hummel deserves a lot of credit for steering these young students through the collaborative process of creating a cartoon.

The Cartoon Art Museum is accepting applications for the upcoming academic year. The program is sponsored by the San Francisco Department of Children, Youth and Their Families (DCYF), the San Francisco Foundation, the Hellman Family Foundation, and the Cartoon Art Museum.

Korean Comics: A Society Through Small Frames

Korean Comics: A Society Through Small Frames, curated by the Korea Society at the San Francisco Public Library (March 13-June 13, 2010)

This exhibition, hung in the library’s large Jewett Gallery (lower level), displayed 83 framed works by twenty-one Korean cartoonists (based in both North and South) to give library patrons insight into contemporary Korean culture. The works shown were all printed pages or reproductions published since the mid-1950’s (no original drawings). I didn’t view the lack of original artwork as any sort of handicap, and felt that seeing the printed pages lent a sense of immediacy to the show. The works explored a wide range of topics including social commentary, historical dramas, fantasies of personal empowerment, action stories, fairy tales, feminist characters and political propaganda. The example on the left is a panel from the newspaper strip Kobau by Kim Seong Hwan.There were many media represented such as newspaper comic strips, political cartoons, children’s magazines, comic books and compilation novels. Throughout the exhibition, reproductions of the panels with English translation were available (and greatly appreciated).

On entering the gallery, one immediately encounters a large cover drawing from Chumŏk Taejang (Fist Boss, published 1958-1994) created by Kim Won Bin (b. 1935, China), depicting a young girl energetically brandishing a huge Popeye-like fist, ponytail and school girl skirt swinging. Possessed of supernatural mental and physical abilities, Kim Won Bin’s young characters were iconic symbols of personal empowerment. Also on display were some panels from the epic serial Four Daughters of Armian (1986-1995) by Shin il-Sook (b. 1962, Korea) whose stories challenged the tradition of preferential treatment of sons and discrimination against daughters. I found it interesting that many of her key characters are drawn as Western style blondes, which she explains as “a way for female readers to indulge their voyeurism.” Also borrowing from the Western style was Park Bong Seong (b. 1949, Korea), whose action adventure works include such titles as Two Year Old Emperor (1983) and A Man Called God (1995-2000). In these stories average people become strong and influential though success in business or government and have James Bond-like adventures.

In contrast to these South Korean stories of personal exploration and power, The Great General Mighty Wing (1990’s), by Cho Pyŏng-Kwon (story) and Lim Wal-Yong (art) is a story of personal sacrifice for the greater good written and published with the encouragement and resources of the North Korean government. In this lavishly illustrated (cover illustration on the left), full color comic series an army of anthropomorphic Socialist bees protect “The Garden of One Thousand Flowers.” The title character became iconic within N. Korea in the 1990’s as a symbol of loyalty to the government and their brand of communism.

Also included in the exhibition were Park Ki Jeong, Kim Seong Huan, Kim Yong Hwan, Shin Mu Su, Kil Chang Deok, Yoon Sweng Un, Kim Soo Jung, Kim Tai-Kwon, Hwang Mina, Kim Hyeong Bae, Park Soo Kong, and others. I was please to see that the library had available a handout with an extensive bibliography highlighting the Korean graphic novels, manga, comic books and other comics reference works in their ever-growing collection. Concurrently, the library also had a comics themed film series Beyond Superheroes (screening Ghost World, Persepolis, Chasing Amy and Dick Tracy) and an exhibition entitled Coloring Outside the Lines: Black Cartoonists as Social Commentator, curated by Kheven LaGrone, who recently produced SFPL’s well received Morrie Turner retrospective. This show featured original drawings by Darrin Bell, Stephen Bentley, Cory Thomas, Jerry Craft, Keith Knight, Morrie Turner, Nate Creekmore, Brumsic Brandon Jr., Barbara Brandon-Croft and Makeda Rashidi.

The Bodies Are Back - Show Extended

Back in January, I posted about the truly astonishing exhibition of the art of feminist/pop art pioneer Margaret Harrison at Intersection for the Arts The Bodies are Back, which has just been extended through April 16, 2010. On the left is her Ejaculo, 2007, Watercolor, colored pencil, and graphite on paper (courtesy of Intersection for the Arts, © 2007 Margaret Harrison).

I am fascinated with the use of comics characters and other pop culture references to comment on gender and sexuality in these thought provoking works. Her dramatic story of censorship (her first showing of these works was shut down in by the police for indecency in 1971), success and eventual return to this theme is very interesting. I plan to write a longer article about this.

In the meantime, there have been many reviews including an interview with Jolene Torr on ArtSlant, SFGate, StarkSilverCreek, Mission Eyes (includes video), SFStation, and SF Weekly.

Harrison also tells me that some of her work has been selected to be included the Tate's Rude Britania show this summer (my post is below).

Once Upon a Dream at the Cartoon Art Museum

Once Upon a Dream: the Art of Sleeping Beauty - Cartoon Art Museum, San Francisco (July 18, 2009 – January 10, 2010).

This excellent exhibition at the Cartoon Art Museum celebrates the 50th anniversary of the release of Disney’s visual masterpiece Sleeping Beauty. On display are concept paintings, model sheets, cels, production drawings, color keys, photos and other ephemera that tell the story of the making of Sleeping Beauty from design concept through the finished film. Sleeping Beauty was a Disney milestone: a Technorama 70, 6-channel stereophonic vision of the Perrault fairy tale that took over five years and $6 million to make. Stunning as it was visually, the film cost so much to make that it lost money when it was released in 1959, even though its box office take was only beaten by Oscar-winner Ben Hur. The film had a comeback with the 1979 & 1986 reissues, when it finally took its place among the rest of Disney’s classic (and money-making) films.

Unlike many Disney features, the visual style of Sleeping Beauty was driven primarily by one man, supervising color stylist/inspirational sketch artist Eyvind Earle. Earle was a painter and greeting card designer that was hired at Disney in 1951. Earle painted backgrounds and concept paintings for shorts like The Little House and Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom and the features Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp. When Walt Disney decided he wanted to do something with a completely unique look, he took a chance on Earle, and gave him unprecedented control over the project.

Earle created a “medieval tapestry” inspired by the paintings of Durer, Van Eyck, Breughel, and 15th century French illuminated manuscripts, especially the Tres Riches Heures de Jean, Duc de Berri, as well as Persian miniatures and Japanese art. Another influence was the minimalist, streamlined style of 1950’s graphic design. Many of Earle’s concept and background paintings are featured in this exhibit. I was spellbound by the contrast of the stylized sharp angles, rich color palette, and dense detail work. At one point in the exhibit, there is a concept drawing by Mary Blair for the cover of a Sleeping Beauty storybook, and it’s interesting to contrast Blair's whimsical style with Earle's, and imagine how different the film would have looked based on Blair’s designs.

Many of the animators, which included the famous Nine Old Men and Production Designer Ken Anderson, were concerned that the backgrounds were too cold for a romantic comedy and that the detailed backgrounds would swallow the characters. This struggle is mapped out in a series of model sheets and character concept sketches that show the amount of work that went into finding character and costume designs that would stand out against Earle’s grandiose backgrounds. Of particular interest in this section of the exhibition were drawings of Princess Aurora, who was loosely based on Audrey Hepburn. The princess presented special problems as she has only 18 minutes of screen time to establish herself as the sympathetic heroine before she's fated to meet up with that nasty spinning wheel and sleep through the rest of the film. On top of that, she is living in the forest when the character is introduced, and is dressed in a muted wardrobe that echoes the natural surroundings. The drawings show the character's progression from forest maiden to a princess regally attired in blue or rose colored gowns. Also of interest were different versions of the 3 good fairies, a photo sheet of Maleficent’s two-horned “devil” headdress from every conceivable angle (the animators had a really hard time drawing it), and photos of the "live cast" who acted out the characters for the animators, enabling them to achieve more realistic movement in their drawings.

Much of the work featured in this show is drawn from the collection of Ron Dias, a Disney artist/illustrator whose first professional job in the animation industry was as an in-betweener and clean-up animator on Sleeping Beauty. Dias went on to become one of the most highly-regarded and sought-after background artists and color stylists in the business. The exhibition includes a spotlight section with a selection of Dias’ own work, such as background paintings and color concepts from The Secret of Nimh, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and The Little Mermaid.

Photo: Production cel of the evil witch Malificent (animated by Mack Davis) and a concept drawing of Sleeping Beauty's castle by Eyvind Earle, courtesy of the Cartoon Art Museum.

Beyond High & Low in the IJOCA

My article Beyond High & Low: How Comics & Museums Learned to Co-Exist, has been published in the Fall 2009 edition of the International Journal of Comic Art. Thank you John Lent, for finding my piece on the "paper table" at PCA/ACA New Orleans last year and inviting me.

Beyond High & Low is about art world politics, modernism, and how The Comic Art Show (Whitney, 1983), MoMA's High & Low (1990) and Masters of Comics (2005) built on and responded to each other, as well as a few lesser known shows and some exhibition strategies. Since I wrote this article, I've done extensive research and interviews about The Comic Art Show. This was the show that brought Art Spiegelman, John Carlin, Brian Walker and Ann Philbin together, and helped launch Sheena Wagstaff's career, as well as being the first show to display comic art and fine art as equal works in New York museum setting. I was beginning this research when I presented at SDCC in July, and will be presenting on the finished paper at PCA/ACA in St. Louis in March.

IJOCA articles are not published on line. If you are interested in a hard copy or subscribing to the IJOCA, their site is here.

Morrie Turner at SFPL

Morrie Turner, Creator of Wee Pals Cartoon: a 45 Year Retrospective, an exhibition produced by the AfroSolo Theatre Company at the San Francisco Public Library (August 15 - October 15, 2009), showed an impressive range of work by this award winning cartoonist. Large display cases clustered in three locations within the library explored not only his best-known work, the Wee Pals comic strip, but also Turner’s Soul Corner panels and the social/political cartoons he created in the 1960’s & 70’s for publications like Black World and Ebony.

Turner, a life-long resident of Oakland, California, was born in 1923. He was a self-taught artist, and some of his first publications were strips he drew for military magazines while serving in WWII. After his service was completed, he continued drawing, supplementing his income with a job as a police clerk.

With the encouragement of Charles Schulz, Turner became a full-time cartoonist in 1964. In 1965, he developed a racially-integrated comic strip called Dinky Fellas that ran in five newspapers, which was renamed Wee Pals. By 1966, Wee Pals could be seen in over 70 newspapers in the US and abroad. The strip gained true nationwide acceptance after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, when it’s publication expanded to over 100 newspapers nationwide, making it the first nationally syndicated racially-integrated comic strip.

The library exhibition, curated by Kheven Legrone, devotes several display cases to Wee Pals. Outside the Children’s Center, on the library’s second floor, two cases featured Wee Pals books and memorabilia, and paintings that were used as background slides for a children’s concert series, A Journey Into Jazz, performed by the Oakland Symphony at the Paramount Theatre. These slides featured portraits of famous jazz musicians, and child characters demonstrating dance moves in different styles. Turner would attend these concerts, sketching the children that attended and giving them the drawings.

The heart of the exhibition, upstairs in the African American Center, focuses on the development of the Wee Pals characters (some based on Turner, his son, grandchildren and friends), his production methods on the Wee Pals strip, and his political cartoons. Many of these single panel “civil rights cartoons” (as Turner called them), drawn with pen, ink and watercolor, found humor in irony. For example, one drawing depicts a White panhandler saying “Thanks, Boy” to a wealthy Black gentleman that had just deposited a dollar in his cup (Turner says this really happened to him). Also featured in this part of the exhibition was a series of cartoons Turner created in 1969, when he was invited with five other cartoonists by the National Cartoonist Society to travel to Vietnam to entertain the troops. He spent twenty-seven days on the front lines and in hospitals sketching more than 3,000 caricatures of service people.

Turner’s drawings for the Sunday Soul Corner panels were prominently displayed in the third floor main lobby. These drawings, originally meant to fill up the "drop out panel" in Turner's Sunday strips, illustrate the accomplishments of famous persons of color.

Turner (shown in conversation with Belva Davis at the SFPL 11/15/09) still lives in Oakland in the house his father bought in 1941, and continues to reach out to children through small cartooning classes and guest lectures at schools. Turner’s life was the subject of the 2001 documentary, Keeping the Faith with Morrie, produced by Angel Harper for Heaven Sent Productions Inc.

Revisiting The Comic Art Show at SDCC

A quick note related to my on-going project exploring the relationships between comic art, fine art and museums: I am currently researching The Comic Art Show, which happened at the downtown branch of the Whitney Museum in New York over the summer of 1983. This show, co-curated by John Carlin (co-curator of Masters of American Comics in 2005) and Sheena Wagstaff (currently the chief curator at the Tate Modern), was one of the first to display comic art and fine art as equal works in a US art museum setting.

August Update: Since I originally posted this, I have presented on this show at PCA/ACA and WonderCon as part of a general "comics in museums" talk, and have more specifically presented on this show with new research at San Diego Comic Con 2009. You can view both of these presentations using the SlideShare widget on the sidebar, or at the bottom of this page. I have written generally about this show in the article Beyond High & Low: How Comics and Museums Learned to Co-exist, which will be published in the upcoming issue of the IJOCA. Since writing that article, I have done research at the Frances Mulhill Achilles Library at the Whitney Museum, and have interviewed John Carlin, Sheena Wagstaff and Anne Philbin, as well as delving into the art scene and art criticism of the 1980's. I expect to complete the article fall 2009.

Update 3/2012 - I have committed to finally finishing my research on this topic and publishing it in the IJOCA for the fall/winter 2012 issue. 

Kim Speaking at PCA/ACA

I just found out that I will be speaking about comics and museums at another conference, the PCA/ACA (Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association) in New Orleans in April (thanks for the suggestion Hannah). My talk will be entitled Beyond High & Low: How Comics and Museums Learned to Coexist. More on this as the schedule evolves. I haven't been to New Orleans since the flood, so I'm looking forward to seeing what its present condition is with my own eyes.