Category Archives: Illustration Faculty

Great feature in the NYTimes on Jonathan Levine Gallery

Exhibitions, Illustration Alumni, Illustration Faculty, Illustration Industry, Inspiration, News, , , , , , , ,

This past weekend, the New York Times did a fantastic write-up of the Jonathan Levine Gallery, who is celebrating their fifth anniversary.  The Gallery has always been a champion of illustration and shows the work of multiple Parsons Illustration alums and faculty members.  Here’s a snippet from the write-up:

For the current fifth-anniversary exhibition at his New York gallery Jonathan LeVine has filled it with works by 35 artists, most of whom he represents. The space is in Chelsea, but there’s no cerebral conceptualism, cool abstraction or painterly gesture on view.

Instead this work, variously labeled Lowbrow Art, Pop Surrealism and perhaps most accurately Pop Pluralism, is the skateboarding, graffiti-tagging, sometimes bratty and rebellious younger sibling of the art shown in most of the neighborhood’s locations. Still, the art in the Jonathan LeVine Gallery seems at home in Chelsea in a way it did not five years ago. After years on the fringes of the art world, “we’ve come to a turning point,” Mr. LeVine said recently. “The mainstream is embracing this work.”

Read the rest of the article here and also make sure to check out the great multi-media section featuring lots of images and commentary from Jonathan himself.  The Five Year Anniversary Group Exhibition is on view at Jonathan Levine through March 27th and includes works by Parsons Illustration alums Isabel Samaras, AJ Fosik, Andy Kehoe, and Parsons Illustration faculty Tara McPherson.

Congrats to Jonathan, his staff, and all the artists he represents!

Jonathan LeVine Gallery
529 West 20th Street, 9th floor
New York, NY 10011
212-243-3822

HOURS: Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm

[image by Andy Kehoe, “Passing Through the Forest Deep”]

Blab! A Retrospective opens at Society of Illustrators on March 26th

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OPENING NIGHT: March 26, 2010; 6:00 pm

100-PIECE EXHIBIT FEATURING:
Parsons Illustration Associate Professor Nora Krug, Parsons Illustration Chair Steven Guarnaccia Gary Baseman, Sue Coe, The Clayton Brothers, Chris Ware, SHAG!, Drew Friedman, Gary Taxali, Tim Biskup, and MANY MORE!

BLAB!, founded in 1986 by Monte Beauchamp, is a periodic anthology featuring work by some of the world’s brightest artists, illustrators, and printmakers.

Join us in this celebration.

BLAB!, a periodic anthology of visual art, was founded by Chicago-based graphic designer and art director Monte Beauchamp in 1986. Characterized by an emphasis on comics, the first seven issues of BLAB! were produced in a digest-sized format (5½” x 8½”), printed in black-and-white with a color cover, and contained illustrated stories by such figures as Joe Coleman, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Drew Friedman, Chris Ware, and ZAP artist Spain Rodriguez.

In 1995, after a three year hiatus, the eighth issue of BLAB! appeared with a redesigned format and a significant shift in editorial focus. It was square (10″ x 10″), included 4-color printing on the interior, and featured a cover commissioned from the then relatively unknown Chris Ware, now a renowned comic artist. Ware’s impeccably drawn cover design and tag line, “Liberating Art from Quality,” heralded BLAB!’s new direction. Beauchamp significantly reduced the number of prose pieces, featured fewer comics artists, and invited illustrators such as Gary Baseman, Christian Northeast, The Clayton Brothers, Jonathon Rosen and Mark Ryden to contribute. He also featured selections of vintage “found” graphics such as depression-era matchbook covers, Valmor cosmetic labels, and European devil postcards. Though it has continued to reflect Beauchamp’s passion for storytelling, BLAB!‘s character is resolutely visual. Each year he invites approximately twenty-five visual artists from the fields of sequential art, graphic design, illustration, painting, and printmaking to contribute to BLAB!, a selection informed by Beauchamp’s distinctive vision and aesthetic.

Today BLAB! is acclaimed as a highly influential periodical of visual art and as a venue for work by some of the world’s brightest artists, illustrators, and printmakers.

BIO:
Monte Beauchamp is an award-winning art director/graphic designer whose work has appeared in Graphis, Communication Arts, SPDA, Print, American Illustration, and The Society of Illustrators Annual. He has received numerous awards and honors, and has served as a juror forAmerican Illustration and The Society of Illustrators.

He is the founder and editor of the graphics-illustration-comics annualBLAB! His books include: The Life & Times of R. Crumb (St. Martin’s Press), Striking Images: Vintage Matchbook Cover Art (Chronicle Books),The Devil in Design (Fantagraphics), and New & Used BLAB! (Chronicle Books).

He is the founder, editor, and designer of BLAB! Picto-Novelettes – a series of story books presented in a faux-children’s book format for adults. Titles include: Sheep of Fools by Sue Coe and Judith Brody, Old Jewish Comedians by Drew Friedman, The Magic Bottle by Camille Rose Garcia,Struwwelpeter by Bob Staake, and SHAG: A to Z.

Artist as Author Symposium is happening on March 27th!

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The Illustration Program at Parsons The New School for Design presents:

The Artist as Author — a symposium on self-illustrated texts in history and contemporary practice.
Saturday, March 27, 2010 from 3 – 8:30pm
The New School, Wollman Hall, 5th Floor, 66 West 12th Street, NYC
Free and open to the public

Patrica Mainardi (CUNY Graduate Center) on Popular Prints and Comics.
Emily Lauer, (MA MPhil CUNY) on William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair illustrations
David Kurnick (Rutgers University) on The Theatrical Impulse and the Illustrated Novel.
Ben Katchor (Parsons The New School) on Picture-recitation.
Jerry Moriarty (School of Visual Arts) presents his latest project: Whatsa Paintoonist?

The participants:

Patricia Mainardi is Professor of Art History at City University of New York, where she teaches at The Graduate Center. Her publications include Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (Yale, 1987), which received the College Art Association Charles Rufus Morey Award for the best art history book of 1988; The End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third Republic (Cambridge, 1994); Husbands, Wives, and Lovers: Marriage and Its Discontents in Nineteenth-Century France (Yale, 2003); and many articles and catalogues. She is currently completing a book: Another World: Illustrated Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century France, which includes chapters on caricature, book illustration, popular prints and comics.

Emily Lauer, MA MPhil, teaches Children’s Literature at Hunter College, where her students routinely say brilliant and helpful things about illustrations. “Signs as Designs” is part of her PhD dissertation, “Drawing Conclusions: Visual Literacy In Fiction,” which she will defend later this Spring at the CUNY Graduate Center.

David Kurnick is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University. He is working on a book called Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel of Interiority about major novelists with frustrated theatrical careers.

Ben Katchor’s picture-stories appear in Metropolis magazine. His upcoming collection of weekly strips, The Cardboard Valise, will be published by Pantheon Books. His most recent music-theater collaboration with Mark Mulcahy, A Checkroom Romance, will be performed at Lincoln Center in May 2010. He is an Associate Professor at Parsons, The New School for Design in New York City.

Jerry Moriarty has taught painting and drawing at The School of Visual Arts in NYC since 1963. A prolific artist, writer and illustrator, his work has appeared in Raw magazine, Kramers Ergot, Comic Art Magazine and The Best American Comics, 2009. In the 1980s and 90s, he produced a series of subway posters for The School of Visual Arts. His work has been exhibited at the Corridor Gallery in Soho, SVA Museum, Cue Foundation, the Phoenix Art Museum and the Vancouver Art Gallery. His latest book, The Complete Jack Survives, was published by Buenaventura Press in 2009. He was interviewed by Chris Ware in The Believer (art issue) in 2009. He was the recipient of an NEA grant.

Upcoming Comics History/New York History events

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boss tweed

The New York Center for Independent Publishing presents:

Comics History/New York History

New York City was the birthplace of the modern comic book, and the city has had a starring role in some of the greatest and most influential work the medium has produced. The New York Center for Independent Publishing will be presenting a series of events looking at the rich history of Comics and the City. Join us at our historic building at 20 West 44th Street as we explore the city through comics, from Riverdale to the Baxter Building, from Dropsie Avenue to Forest Hills, to untangle the relationship between the world’s greatest city and the comics that chronicle its history. Visit  www.nycip.org for more information!

New York, the Super-City

Tuesday, March 9th, 6:30 pm

New York served as the model for Gotham City, inspired Will Eisner as he created the noirish adventures of The Spirit, and became a recurring character during the 1960s resurgence of Marvel in comics such as Spider-Man and Iron Man.ForeWord Magazine contributing editor Peter Gutiérrez will moderate a talk on the relationship between superheroes and their favorite hometown… and on how comics culture has promoted potent and memorable images of New York to readers worldwide.

“Carousel” in New York

Tuesday, April 20th, 6:30 pm

The series closes with a multimedia presentation hosted by R. Sikoryak, Parsons faculty member and author of Masterpiece Comics. This event will feature work and performances from some the of the top comics artists working in New York.

Admission is $15, $10 for Members, and $5 for students.

“Hey, Rabbit!” signing and reading this coming Sunday

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Please come to the first reading and signing of:

Hey, Rabbit!

A new picture book by Sergio Ruzzier (Parsons Illustration Faculty!)
Sunday, February 28th at 11am

BookCourt
163 Court Street between Pacific and Dean
Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, NY

For more fun, take a look at:

Hey, Rabbit! blog: http://sergioruzzier.blogspot.com

Hey, Rabbit! video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqS8t_suYtE

Hey, Rabbit! web page: http://ruzzier.com/heyrabbit.html

Hey, Rabbit! drawing game: http://ruzzier.com/game.html

Carousel cartoon slide show on Feb. 16

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Dixon Place presents…

CAROUSEL
Cartoon slide shows & other projected pictures
presented by a glittering array of artists, performers, graphic novelists, & other characters.

Hosted by R. Sikoryak

Featuring:

Glenn Head
M. Sweeney Lawless
Allison Silverman
Doug Skinner
Lauren R. Weinstein
Julia Wertz
and more!

Wednesday, February 16, 2011
7:30 pm

at
Dixon Place
161 A Chrystie Street
(btwn Rivington & Delancey)
NY, NY

Tickets:
$15 each
or TDF;  or $12 student/senior
or $25 for 2 with Carousel postcard

Advance tickets & more info:
www.dixonplace.org
(212) 219-0736

Carousel Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6301533565&ref=ts

Illustration Alums and Faculty fundraise for Haiti!

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Parsons Illustration Alum and current Adjunct Faculty member Veronica Lawlor passed along the following information about Studio 1482‘s fundraising efforts to help the people of Haiti.  Here’s the scoop:

In response to the recent terrible earthquake in Haiti, the illustrators of Studio 1482 have each created a piece of art to raise  money on behalf of the victims. It is our effort to support the international appeal for funds by CARE, a leading humanitarian relief organization. We’ve selected CARE because we believe in their commitment.

For each donation of $50 or more to CARE, you will receive a hand-signed 13″ x 19″ limited edition print from one of the Studio 1482 illustrators.

See all the beautiful illustrations available and get more information about Studio 1482 here.

Associate Professor Nora Krug is working with the Poster Cause Project and has created an open-edition poster which is being sold to support in the relief efforts.  ALL 100% OF PROFITS from this print will be donated to Doctors Without Borders, an international medical humanitarian organization created by doctors and journalists in France in 1971.  You can get Nora’s poster here.

Parsons Illustration Alum and current Adjunct Faculty member Trey Hoyumpa is pitching in with her own humanitarian effort–hand-pulled silkscreen cards with the proceeds benefitting Haiti.  You can grab your own at Trey’s Etsy shop, located here.

[top image by Veronica Lawlor; middle image by Nora Krug; bottom image by Trey Hoyumpa]

Call for Entries: Student Submissions for Society Illustrators 2010 and American Illustration 29

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(Click on image below to enlarge and get all the important details about how Parsons Illustration students can submit to these important and prestigious illustration competitions!)

Steven Guarnaccia interview for The Rumpus

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Illustration Chair Steven Guarnaccia attended the First Annual Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival and was interviewed Katie Geha of therumpus.net Here’s an excerpt of Katie’s article:

Steven Guarnaccia, Chair of the Illustration Department at Parsons, is generous in talking with me about the contemporary comics scene. He explains that while illustrators once created images to respond to a text given by a client, say a magazine or a newspaper, now more and more artists are creating their own texts. “When I came to the program around six years ago,” Guarnaccia says. “It was very clear that the most exciting stories were being generated by the artists themselves.” These visual narratives have since translated to a larger cultural realm as artists move beyond the comic book, creating toys and t-shirts, and often exhibiting prints in art galleries.

The article also mentions Illustration Alum Leah Hayes, so make sure to check out the rest of the write-up here.