All posts by amt

New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium for Feb. 10, 2015

The 114th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, February 10, 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.

unnamed-6

Aidan Koch will discuss the prevalence and participation of comics and comics format in contemporary art.

Aidan Koch is an artist working in New York City. She has released several graphic novels including Xeric Award winner The Blonde Woman, and Impressions. Her sculpture and installation work has been exhibited in Antwerp, Paris, Austin, and Brooklyn.

Parsons Alumni Reception, Friday 2/13

Screen Shot 2015-02-02 at 2.12.38 PM

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.

NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium: Nick Thorkelson on Herbert Marcuse

technologyThe 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.

NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium *Special Edition: Eddy Portnoy

402px-siyer-i_nebi_151bA 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.

NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium: Peter Maresca

kidscrackerc-small1The 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.

NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium: Marguerite Van Cook

Screen Shot 2014-11-25 at 10.36.47 AM

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/

NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium

The 108th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, November 25, 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.

hogarth-image

Abigail Zitin on William Hogarth: Narrative Art and Visual Pleasure.

British artist William Hogarth (1697–1763) is, arguably, the ur–graphic novelist, famous above all for pioneering the form of the pictorial narrative series (for instance, in A Harlot’s Progress and The Rake’s Progress). For this reason, his work has always been championed by literary critics, particularly those committed to thinking about textuality across media as well as the development of the novel form in English literature. But in addition to his popular graphic works, Hogarth also published The Analysis of Beauty, an essay whose main arguments often seem at odds with the images for which he is best known. In the Analysis, Hogarth defines beauty abstractly, as an effect of lines and spatial relationships rather than representational content; he has remarkably little to say about storytelling, visual or otherwise. This presentation explores the disconnect between Hogarth’s theory and his reputation as a virtuoso of visual narrative, asking how―and whether―we should reconcile the visual style of by this famously literary artist with the formal principles he seems to have held dear. I approach this question by looking closely at how Hogarth talks about technique: both his careful attention to the mechanical practices of drawing, sculpting, and engraving―even boxing and dancing―and his evident insecurity about expressing his ideas verbally. Hogarth never lets his reader forget that he is not a writer, and this self-consciousness, I argue, should prompt a reexamination of what it might mean to describe him (whether appreciatively or critically) as a literary artist.

Abigail Zitin is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ and the 2014–15 Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. She studies aesthetics, visual culture, and literary criticism in eighteenth-century Britain; her research focuses on Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty and the history of formalism. A recent essay on Hogarth’s aesthetics appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies; another is forthcoming in ELH.

Pop-Up Gallery Show for Beyond the Page

DeathBecomesUs_GalleryShow1Check 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.

BFA Illustration Alumni Featured on Tictail.com

crybaby collective

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.

 

Illustration Faculty Steven Guarnaccia to Open Exhibition “Line-Up” in Rome

Line Up ImageIllustration Faculty Member Steven Guarnaccia will be exhibiting his work in Line-Up at the Tricromia Art Gallery in Rome. Learn more about his exhibition below!

Running from November 15 – December 5
Opening Saturday November 18, 2014.
Tricromia Art Gallery Rome, Italy

About the Exhibition: Line-Up is a retrospective exhibition of the illustration work of Steven Guarnaccia. The “line-up” is the classic parade of possible perpetrators before the victim of a crime. Guarnaccia works primarily in line, with pen, ink and watercolor. He is above all interested in how, with a minimum of means, line conveys character, and in turn how character conveys an idea.

Learn more about Steven’s work here.