The seventy-eighth meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 11, 2014 at 7:00 PM at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public.

Presentations: Huguette Martel on her work and Michael Lobel on John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration.

Huguette Martel will present some of her New Yorker cartoons as well as her most recent narrative work: The Adventures of a would-be Filmmaker. Her main concern is the relationship between pictures and text and also how to tell very personal stories in a discreet, hopefully humorous way. Huguette Martel was born in France in 1938; the daughter of Lithuanian Jews, she spent World War II hiding with a  peasant family.  She’s been living in New York since she was 19. A graduate from Cooper Union, she started by doing large abstract-expressionist paintings. For the last 25 years, she has concentrated on narrative paintings:  painted images combined with a painted texts on canvas.  In the early 90s, the New Yorker magazine published a series of her cartoons and full-color pages.  She has shown in several galleries; in 2007, she had a one-man show in at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, NY. Lately, she’s gone from wall paintings to a smaller format designed for books.

Michael Lobel on John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration. This talk will explore the importance of illustration to 20th-century American artist John Sloan’s artistic career. Better known as a member of The Eight and the Ashcan School, Sloan began his professional life as a commercial illustrator, working for more than a decade on newspapers like the Philadelphia Press and later for mass-market magazines. The talk will include numerous archival images, including newspaper word puzzles and comic strips, which will be used to highlight Sloan’s distinctive approach and to provide further insight into illustration as a modern visual form.  Michael Lobel is a professor of art history and director of the MA Program in Modern and Contemporary Art, Criticism and Theory at Purchase College, SUNY. In addition to regular exhibition catalog essays and articles on modern and contemporary art, his publications include three books: Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art (2002); James Rosenquist: Pop Art, Politics and History in the 1960s (2009); and John Sloan:Drawing on Illustration, recently published by Yale University Press.