Category Archives: News

Bestiarium MMX in Bologna

Current Students, Events, Exhibitions, Illustration Alumni, Illustration Dept. Events, Illustration Industry, News, , , , , ,

On the occasion of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, please join us for the opening of an exhibition of illustrations on the theme of the Bestiary, from six international art and design schools:

Accademia di Belli Arti di Bologna • www.accademiabelleartibologna.it
Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava • www.vsvu.sk
ENSAD, Paris • www.ensad.fr
HAW, Hamburg • www.design.haw-hamburg.de
Kyoto City University of Arts • www.kcua.ac.jp
Parsons The New School for Design, New York • parsonsillustration.wordpress.com

Inside North Korea screening on March 25th

Events, film, Illustration Dept. Events, Inspiration, News, , ,

On March 25th, LINK, a west cost based non-profit organization supporting refugees from North Korea (www.linkglobal.org), will visit Parsons to feature INSIDE NORTH KOREA, a documentary by National Geographic reporter Lisa Ling. The documentary follows a Nepalese surgeon on his trip to North Korea, whose goal is to perform eye surgery on 1000 patients within a short period of time. The movie provides a rare glimpse into the most secretive society on earth.

Please join us for this rare screening on March 25th, 6:30, at the Orientation Room / Bark Room on the ground floor at 2W 13th street at Parsons The New School for Design.

North Korean propaganda image from: www.koreabiglist.com

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”]

FACE VALUE –>A Talk by DB Dowd on March 11th (New time and location!)

Education, Events, Illustration Dept. Events, Illustration Industry, Inspiration, News, Talks/Lectures, ,

FACE VALUE –>A Talk by DB Dowd

THURSDAY, MARCH 11TH, 2010 7:30 PM (NEW TIME!)

Room A510, 66 W. 12th Street (NEW LOCATION!)

Douglas B. Dowd is a professor of Communication Design and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Dowd is active as a curator, essayist and critic in the realm of modern graphic culture, writing on theoretical and historical topics in comics, animation, and illustration. He writes the blog Graphic Tales at http://www.ulcercity.blogspot.com/ and serves as an advisor to the Norman Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He co-edited Strips, Toons & Bluesies: Essays on Comics and Culture for Princeton Architectural Press in 2006 and served as a curatorial advisor for Ephemeral Beauty: Al Parker and the American Women’s magazine, 1940-1960 at the Rockwell in 2007.

Originally trained as a printmaker, Dowd’s books and prints are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Fogg Museum at Harvard University. His illustration work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Last year, Dowd published Visit Mohicanland, an online illustrated novel, at http://visit-mohicanland.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

From Lascaux Caves to Autocad–Brett Littman from the Drawing Center visits Parsons!

Current Students, Education, Events, Illustration Dept. Events, Illustration Industry, Inspiration, News, Talks/Lectures, , ,

Parsons The New School for Design Presents:

Is This A Drawing? From Lascaux Caves to Autocad
Brett Littman, Executive Director of the Drawing Center

The kick-off event of a collaboration between The Drawing Center and Parsons. Free and Open to the Public.

Tuesday,
March 9, 2010
6:30 pm
The New School
66 West 12th Street
Room A510

Brett Littman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center — is the only fine arts institution in the United States to focus solely on the exhibition of drawings –, will present a lecture entitled “From Lascaux Caves to Autocad.” A wide range of issues will be explored, including: What is the relevance of drawing in contemporary culture? How does one define the activity of drawing today? What does it mean to expand the definition of drawing to encompass architecture, design, music, science, dance? This talk will also explore the curatorial decisions that have shaped the Drawing Center’s upcoming programming.

The Strand Tote Bag Design Contest

Call for Entries, Current Students, design, Illustration Industry, Inspiration, News, , , , , , , , , ,

The Strand Book Store has partnered with the School of Visual Arts, TOON Books, Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics Books to host a tote bag design contest.

Beginning March 1, 2010, artists from around the world are invited to submit original illustrations featuring the Strand Book Store.

In June 2007, the Strand unveiled the first Artist Tote Bag: Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman loaned his iconic Maus image for the first time ever to celebrate the Strand’s 80th birthday. The Strand then partnered with artists each year, including Adrian Tomine, Seth and Parsons Illustration Alum and Faculty member R. Sikoryak, creating the Strand’s Artist Tote Series. Now, the Strand Book Store wants to give emerging artists the opportunity to have their artwork featured on a Strand tote bag.

Now, the Strand Book Store wants to give emerging artists the opportunity to have their artwork featured on a Strand tote bag.

Contest Dates

March 1-March 31, 2010

Design Requirements

  • The illustration must represent the Strand Book Store.
  • The illustration must include the artist’s signature, “Strand Book Store NYC” and “strandbooks.com” or a representation of the Strand logo (as seen on this page).
  • Size of Illustration: Artwork must be no larger than 11″w x 10″h.
  • Line Weight: Use a minimum of a 2 pt. rule.
  • Halftones: Must be at a 40 line screen or less, with percentages no less than 20% or greater than 60%.
  • No Trapping: If colors come in contact with each other they CAN NOT overlap.
  • Typestyles: Should be no smaller than 20 pt. on 15 oz. fabric with a minimum of 2 pt. rule. Do not use reverse type smaller than 22 pt. with a minimum line rule of 3 pt. Avoid serif typefaces! Their detail tends to get lost in the canvas.

Contest is open to all, aged 18 and above. The Contest is void where prohibited. Please see official rules below.

Judges:

  • Françoise Mouly, Art Editor of The New Yorker & Editorial Director of TOON Books
  • Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize winning comic artist
  • Steven Heller, co-chair MFA Designer as Author Program, School of Visual Arts
  • R. Sikoryak, creator of the book, Masterpiece Comics
  • Adrian Tomine, author of the bestselling book, Shortcomings

Prizes

Grand Prize

  • artwork on Strand tote bag, sold in store and online w/ attendant marketing-artist name on all materials
  • an afternoon with Françoise Mouly and staff at TOON Books offices
  • complete set of Drawn & Quarterly’s 2009 titles (value: $450)
  • a selection of new and recent Fantagraphics Books releases (value: $450)
  • complete set of TOON Books (value: $150)
  • $100 Think Coffee Gift Card
  • artwork featured in slideshow on partners’ websites

Second Prize

  • complimentary Continuing Education class at School of Visual Arts (value $470)
  • a selection of signed Drawn & Quarterly books (value $90)
  • “I Don’t Like to Read” TOON Books basket (value: $70)
  • a selection of new and recent Fantagraphics Books releases (value: $50)
  • $100 Think Coffee Gift Card
  • artwork featured in slideshow on partners’ websites

Third Prize

  • DaVinci Artist Supply Gift Card (value $300)
  • “Beginning Reader” TOON books basket (value: $70)
  • a selection of signed Drawn & Quarterly books (value $50)
  • a selection of new and recent Fantagraphics Books releases (value: $50)
  • $100 Think Coffee Gift Card
  • artwork featured in slideshow on partners’ websites

20 Finalists will receive a Strand tote bag filled with Fantagraphics & TOON Books gifts and a $20 Strand gift card.

r. sikoryak's tote for the strand!

Continue reading →

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

Events, Exhibitions, Illustration Faculty, Illustration Industry, News, , , , , , , , , ,

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!

comics, Current Students, Education, Events, Illustration Dept. Events, Illustration Faculty, Illustration Industry, Inspiration, News, Talks/Lectures, , , , , , , , ,

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.

Parsons Illustration Alum Dan Springer wins Arts Educator of the Year Award

Illustration Alumni, Inspiration, News, , , ,

The Arts Foundation of Cape Cod has announced the winners of the Third Annual Creative Community Awards. Arts Foundation of Cape Cod Arts Educator of the Year is Daniel Springer of Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School.

After receiving his BFA in Illustration from Parsons School of Design in NYC, Springer received a MA in English from Northeastern University. He also studied performance and theater design at Syracuse University. A teacher for over 20 years, Springer has been teaching the arts at D-Y Regional High School for the last 15. He currently chairs the Fine & Performing Arts Department at D-Y. He has taught a variety of classes including writing, drama, acting, digital art, drawing, printmaking, advertising and humanities. He sits on the Advisory Board of the Cape Cod & Islands Art Educators Association and teaches at the Cape Cod Museum of Art (CCMA). Daniel has also presented workshops at three National Art Education Association national conferences in Boston, Chicago and NYC. Springer is also an active landscape painter whose work can be seen @ www.springed.wordpress.com.

In the past, Springer has championed the production of the D-Y school yearbook and designed and directed multiple theatrical productions. Despite staff and budget cuts, Springer has also increased the variety of arts programs offered to students in the last six years. Working with the CCM A and the Cape Cod & Islands Art Educators Association, Springer has also been instrumental in creating and promoting the annual “Portfolio Day” at the CCMA, an event for Cape Cod students pursuing college arts programs.

Margaret Van Sciver, President of the board of the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod said:  “We are delighted to recognize Daniel Springer as Arts Educator of the Year. His commitment to his students and colleagues at D-Y, and his tireless support of other collaborative arts programs in our region, make him an outstanding role model for students and the Cape’s creative community.”

Lee Weill, an arts instructor at Barnstable High School and member of the advisory board for the Cape Cod & Islands Art Educators Association notes: “Daniel has made art education a top priority in his life. He communicates the value of arts as a career path, an outlet for personal growth and a contributing factor for the benefit of the Cape-wide economy and community.”

The other 2010 Creative Community Awards honorees are: Maestro Royston Nash, Lifetime Achievement; Senator Robert O’Leary, Community Leadership in Support of the Arts; and the Falmouth Artists Guild, Collaborative Arts Project of the Year.

The Arts Foundation of Cape Cod supports, promotes, and celebrates the arts and culture of Cape Cod by creating a strong, stable, and diverse arts environment, and contributing to the quality of life and economic vitality of the region. For more information, visit www.artsfoundation.org.

Congratulations, Daniel!

[image: “Perfect Day” by Daniel Springer]