The School of Art and Design History and Theory and the School of Art, Media, and Technology invite Parsons alumni from all disciplines back to campus for a celebratory alumni reception during the 103rd annual College Art Association Conference.

PARSONS ALUMNI RECEPTION
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 13

6:30 – 8:30 pm
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center Lobby
2 West 13th Street
RSVP

Parsons alumni and all conference registrants are also invited to an Agnes Martin roundtable discussion, moderated by Parsons faculty member Karen Schiff, immediately preceding the reception.

For more information, contact us at alumni@newschool.edu or 212.229.5662 x3784.

The 112th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, January 27, 2015 at 7 pm at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public. Please note 7 pm starting time.

Nick Thorkelson on Herbert Marcuse and Pedagogical Comics
Nick Thorkelson will talk about his projected book-length nonfiction comic on Marcuse, the German philosopher who was a mentor to the 1960s radical movements. The talk will also survey the field of pedagogical comics, from Rius and Rifas to Gonick and Sacco, and Nick’s contributions to that field which include The Underhanded History of the USA, The Comic Strip of Neoliberalism, Economic Meltdown Funnies, and short comics about Mr. Block, Kenneth Patchen, Yiddish poets, radical Christians, and the origins of modern jazz.
The Marcuse book situates Herbert Marcuse in the world of German anti-fascist refugees (Brecht, Adorno, Fritz Lang, Walter Benjamin, etc.), their debates regarding “high” and “low” art, and their contributions to American culture, which arguably include film noir and its poor relations, Crime Does Not Pay and The Spirit.  The book will incorporate Nick’s latest comics story, “You Had to Be There,” about the German historian George Mosse who excited midwestern college students in the 1960s and 70s with his explorations of the detritus of European popular culture.

Nick Thorkelson is a former editorial cartoonist for the Boston Globe who creates comics and cartoons for groups working on industrial safety, worker rights, social welfare, peace, and the environment. For the last ten years he has worked closely with historian Paul Buhle on a series of nonfiction comics, including a 4-pager on the 50th anniversary of Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man which appears in the current issue of Jewish Currents.

A special meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, January 13, 2015 at 7 pm at Parsons The New School, Theresa Lang Student Center, 55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor. Free and open to the public. Please note new location and time.

Eddy Portnoy will revisit his 2014 presentation on “Cartoon Provocateurs: the non-existent red lines of Charlie Hebdo,” in light of this week’s deadly attack on the offices of the French satirical weekly. Also, a screening of documentary clips concerning the events surrounding the reprinting a set of 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that had originally appeared in the Danish newspaper, Jyllands Posten in 2006, in addition to some of their own. Sued in 2007 for defamation of a religious community by the Great Mosque of Paris, the Union of Islamic Organizations of France and the World Muslim League, Charlie Hebdo mounted a vigorous defense and was ultimately absolved of any wrongdoing. A discussion will follow.

Eddy Portnoy teaches in the Judaic Studies program at Rutgers University and also serves as the academic advisor at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. In addition to curating exhibits, he writes and lectures on Jewish popular culture.

The 111th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, December 9, 2014 at 8 pm at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public. Please note 8 pm starting time.

Peter Maresca on Artists and Anarchy, Origins of the Sunday Comics – 1895 to 1915
Discover the first 20 years of comics, a time when there were no set styles or formats for the medium, when artistic anarchy helped spawn a completely new type of entertainment that would influence popular culture for a century to come. Here is a long-overdue examination of the origins of the American Sunday Comic Strip, the art form that gave birth to modern comics. View rare examples of the seminal work of Outcault, Dirks, Swinnerton, McCay, Herriman, and dozens more known and unknown “Founders of the Funnies.”

Peter Maresca  is a lifelong collector of comic strips and owner of Sunday Press. He was a pioneer in digital entertainment when working for Apple and Macromedia in the 1980s and 90s. In 2003, frustrated by forcing comics onto small, monochromatic cell phone screens, he set out to create, on paper, full broadsheet-sized Sunday comics. His proposals were turned down by major publishers and thus he became an “accidental publisher,”  producing his own reprint collections.  The first was the original-size comic strip volume, Little Nemo in Slumberland, So Many Splendid Sundays, and Sunday Press was born. Nine books and 12 Will Eisner Award nominations later, Sunday Press has assembled the first full-size review of the earliest newspaper comics in Society is Nix, Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip.

The 110th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, December 2, 2014 at 7 pm at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public. Please note 7 pm starting time.

Marguerite Van Cook will read from and discuss her original graphic auto/biography The Late Child and Other Animals, accompanied by a slide show of images from the book. The book is written and colored by Van Cook and adapted to the comics form and drawn by artist James Romberger.

A decade after Hetty Martin survives the bombing of Portsmouth by the Nazis in World War II, she gives birth to a child out of wedlock, Marguerite. Now Hetty must go before a tribunal to prove that she is a fit mother. From there, The Late Child and Other Animals tells the story of Marguerite’s childhood in the recovering British naval port and the rural beauty of the Isle of Wight and in Normandy, France. The journeys and struggles over decades of this mother and daughter are linked in five episodes that veer between lyricism, wry wit, and harrowing suspense.

“The hallmarks of this remarkable writer-artist team are intensified in this loose, often lovely, personal coming-of-age narrative, haunted by a dark undercurrent, that focuses on Van Cook and her mother.” – Hillary Chute, author of Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists

“Everything feels so very alive in these pages, words and colors and line!” – Mary Ann Caws, author of The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter.

“Reading The Late Child and Other Animals, one experiences how poetic the graphic novel form can be, how memories rendered through sharp lines, soft watercolors, and penetrating narrative prose can immerse you in worlds far, far away.” – Tahneer Oksman, author of Mourning the Family Album

Marguerite Van Cook came to New York her punk with band The Innocents, after touring the UK with The Clash. She stayed and opened the seminal installation gallery Ground Zero with her partner James Romberger. Her own works as an artist and filmmaker have placed her in many museum collections.

Her current generational graphic memoir The Late Child and Other Animals with James Romberger (Fantagraphics) has been translated and published in France under the title L’Enfant inattendue. Her color work on the graphic memoir 7 Miles a Second, a collaborative project with James Romberger and the late David Wojnarowicz garnered her a nomination for an 2014 Eisner award for Best Painter/Multimedia Artist.

Website: http://margueritevancook.com/

James Romberger’s ecological comic Post York was published in 2012 by Uncivilized Books; it includes a flexi-disc by his son Crosby and it was nominated for an 2013 Eisner award for Best Single Issue. Romberger collaborated with Marguerite Van Cook and the late writer, artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz on the critically acclaimed graphic novel 7 Miles A Second, which was first published in 1996 by DC/Vertigo and then released in a revised, expanded edition in February 2013 by Fantagraphics Books.

Website: http://jamesromberger.com/

Check out the pop-up gallery show featuring projects from this semester’s Beyond the Page class, run by Noël Claro. Along with student work, they will be displaying the results of the collaborative project they did with Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and Universidad Iberoamericana.

The Crybaby Collective, an online store that was formed by a group of BFA Illustration alumni, was recently featured on the Tictail blog! Learn more about the group of artists and the Collective here.

Alumni within the Collective include:

Sarah Bibel, Vincy Cheung, Ayline De Wilde, Hannah Drossman, Caelina Eldred-Thielen, Sylvia Jun, Aleen Montchal, Jieshan Ng, Josie Stevenson, Steph Tan, Grace Wagner, Pinky Weber, and Justin Yoon.