Late-breaking news:
Did you know that Adjunct Faculty Tara McPherson has had a billboard up on 3rd Avenue in Manhattan for the entire month of July? Neither did I until just now! Go check it out while you still can. Get more info about the whole project here.
Way to go, Tara!
From the Illustration Inbox, we’ve got some news about Louisa Bertman (’92):
Louisa Bertman is honored to be 1 of 12 artists chosen to illustrate a page for the upcoming 2009 NPR Calendar. While painting Click and Clack, 2 large portraits were born as an offshoot of the actual NPR Illustration. Check out the portraits as well as her interview with those crazy Car Talk Guys! They’ve listed her this week under “Links We LIke” from their homepage.
Thanks for passing along the good word, Louisa, and congratulations!
Parsons will host a panel at Comic-con in July 2008, featuring Parsons Faculty and alumni in a conversation about how art school, and in particular a Parsons Illustration education, prepares young artists to enter these areas of professional activity. The panel is titled:
“Toys, Comics and Characters: Illustrators as Entertainment Entrepreneurs”
Friday, July 25th, 2008
3:30-4:30 p.m.
Comic-con International
Room 32AB
San Diego Convention Center
111 W. Harbor Drive
San Diego, CA
Faculty and alumni joining us on the panel include: Tara McPherson (Parsons faculty, Vertigo Comics creator), Abby Denson (Alumna and Lulu Award Winning Cartoonist/Author of Tough Love: High School Confidential), Nora Krug (Parsons faculty, BLAB! contributor and internationally published illustrator) and Brian Wood (Parsons alumnus, iconoclastic indie creator of DMZ among other works). The event will highlight the Illustration department’s curriculum and career paths our alumni have followed, while offering attendees information on Parsons degree programs.
Following the panel will be an alumni reception hosted by New School Alumni Relations. Alumni attending Comic-con (or located in Southern California) and industry friends are invited to join Parsons faculty and representatives from Alumni Relations and Career Services for refreshments and conversation.
Straight from the Illustration Inbox, we’ve got an update about Alex Rheault (Illustration ’85):
Alex Rheault has recently been appointed Chair of Illustration at Maine College of Art in Portland, where she resides since 2001. Alex left the Big Apple in 1997, and lived in Sanibel, Florida for two years where she taught cartooning and became the cartoonist in 2000 for the local paper of record, The Island Reporter until 2004.
Alex left hurricane season behind for cooler climes to focus on art, writing, and studies. She completed the Salt for Documentary Studies program as a photography student in 2002, documenting the local fireboat and a wooden boat builder, and attended Vermont College right after, receiving her MFA in 2004.
She teaches drawing, two dimensional design, cartooning, fashion illustration, and illustration related courses in Continuing Studies and the BFA program at MECA, and mentors students privately in writing and visual arts. She exhibits work at Filament gallery in Portland and Patricia Ladd Cargea Gallery in New Hampshire. Her work looks at strategies of authority, language, and hierarchies of preference through everyday objects, images, and text. Her obsession since grad school has been the thinker, Georges
Bataille, whose work has led her to many others.Alex’s most recent projects include drawing room (no “the”), an evolving identity engaging artists and the public in dialogue and collaborative works, curating exhibits with emerging artists, and community engagement. Projects such as Chewed Toys Project invite dogs and people to co-create.
Alex gave a paper at SCAD’s Art History Symposium in April where Fred Wilson was the keynote speaker. She spoke about drawing room projects. Here is a direct link to the presentation and directions for how to find it:
- direct link
- go to the bottom, and click on the icon with a page and arrow.
- then click on “find” icon, and scroll down the green to “drawing room”
- click to begin show!
Alex is actively writing and working towards several upcoming exhibits in 2009.
Visit Alex’s website and also check out Drawing Room, Chewed Toys, and Head on a Stick for info about her work and projects.
Thanks for the update, Alex!
FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS & DESERT ISLAND present:
WHERE DEMENTED WENTED:
Celebrating the Comics and Art of RORY HAYES
Join us for a book release party and panel discussion featuring:
KIM DEITCH
BILL GRIFFITH
GEOFFREY HAYES
and moderator
DAN NADEL
WHAT: Book Release Party for WHERE DEMENTED WENTED: THE ART AND COMICS OF RORY HAYES, with panel discussion and Q&A
WHO: Dan Nadel, Kim Deitch, Bill Griffith & Geoffrey Hayes
WHERE: DESERT ISLAND • 540 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn, NY •718.388.5087
WHEN: Friday, August 8, 7PM (discussion begins at 8PM)
FREE ADMISSION
An exclusive, limited-edition Hayes silkscreen will be available for this event.
The controversial cartoonist Rory Hayes was a self-taught dynamo of the underground comics revolution. Attracting equal parts derision and praise (the latter from the likes of R. Crumb and Bill Griffith), Hayes emerged as comics’ great primitive, drawing horror comics in a genuinely horrifying and hallucinator manner (some have called him the Fletcher Hanks of the underground). He has influenced a generation of cartoonists, from RAW to Fort Thunder and back again.
On Friday, Aug. 8, on what would have been Hayes’ 59th birthday (Hayes died of a drug overdose in 1983), Desert Island and Fantagraphics Books will celebrate the life and art of Rory Hayes with a special evening celebrating the release of WHERE DEMENTED WENTED, the first-ever collection of Hayes’ legendary comics and art.
Editor Dan Nadel (Gary Panter, The Wilco Book) will moderate a discussion of Hayes’ work with three men who knew and worked with Hayes: Kim Deitch (creator of Waldo the Cat), Bill Griffith (creator of Zippy the Pinhead), and Geoffrey Hayes (brother of Rory and author of the recent Benny and Penny from Toon Books).
WHERE DEMENTED WENTED: THE ART AND COMIX OF RORY HAYES is the first retrospective of Hayes’ career ever published, features the best of his underground comics output alongside paintings, covers, and artifacts rarely seen by human eyes—as well as astounding, previously unprinted comics from his teenage years and movie posters for his numerous homemade films. The Art and Comix of Rory Hayes also serves as a biography and critique with a memoir of growing up with Rory by his brother, the illustrator Geoffrey Hayes, and a career-spanning essay by Edward Pouncey (a.k.a. Savage Pencil). Also included is a rare interview with Hayes himself.
This should be a great event and a fantastic book. Check ’em both out!
Parsons will host a panel at Comic-con in July 2008, featuring Parsons Faculty and alumni in a conversation about how art school, and in particular a Parsons Illustration education, prepares young artists to enter these areas of professional activity. The panel is titled:
“Toys, Comics and Characters: Illustrators as Entertainment Entrepreneurs”
Friday, July 25th, 2008
3:30-4:30 p.m.
Comic-con International
Room 32AB
San Diego Convention Center
111 W. Harbor Drive
San Diego, CA
Faculty and alumni joining us on the panel include: Tara McPherson (Parsons faculty, Vertigo Comics creator), Abby Denson (Alumna and Lulu Award Winning Cartoonist/Author of Tough Love: High School Confidential), Nora Krug (Parsons faculty, BLAB! contributor and internationally published illustrator) and Brian Wood (Parsons alumnus, iconoclastic indie creator of DMZ among other works). The event will highlight the Illustration department’s curriculum and career paths our alumni have followed, while offering attendees information on Parsons degree programs.
Following the panel will be an alumni reception hosted by New School Alumni Relations. Alumni attending Comic-con (or located in Southern California) and industry friends are invited to join Parsons faculty and representatives from Alumni Relations and Career Services for refreshments and conversation. Details to follow!
Fireside Cocktail Cuisine is an elegant restaurant located in the Omni Berkshire Hotel on East 52nd Street. World travelers and locals alike love Fireside for the innovative cocktail cuisine and wonderful ambiance. The design is simultaneously warm and edgy, and enclosed glass cases throughout the restaurant are ideal for incredible artwork. In addition to a large main fireplace, there are 2 hanging boxes (18” x 48”) and 3 window boxes (13” x 36”).
We are open to students’ creativity and vision, and welcome any appropriate interpretations of a “New York” theme. All artists will be credited in the restaurant and their work will be for sale at the end of the exhibition. Students have the rare opportunity to display their work in a well-known hotel and highly acclaimed restaurant.
If interested, please contact Camilla Warner at JS2 Communications via email at cwarner@js2comm.com.
Just in case you didn’t catch it, Adjunct Faculty Edward del Rosario did the cover for the New York Times Magazine last week, along with several other accompanying images. Here are two of the illustrations and you can check out the rest here. Way to go, Eddie!
Featuring: Aaron Baker, Erik Bluhm, Martha Colburn, Carl D’Alvia, Edward del Rosario, Echo Eggebrecht, Brent Green, Kirk Hayes, Asuka Ohsawa, Ruby Osorio, Hills Snyder, Rachell Sumpter & others.
Through July 3, 2008
SUNDAY L.E.S.
237 Eldridge Street, South Storefront
New York, NY USA 10002
The gallery is pleased to announce the group exhibition Tenderly, which assembles paintings, sculptures, films, and works on paper by twelve artists who use dark humor, animation, simplified forms, and characters to soften some of life’s more dramatic, and often tragic, moments.
Eddie del Rosario’s (Brooklyn, NY) paintings often feature miniature people engaged in full-size power struggles and highlight the absurd games people are willing to play to obtain and preserve power within cultural clashes. Meticulously rendered with almost Renaissance-like glazes, his most recent series of contretemps depict unforeseen disruptive events, for example, a handsome young man pissing on the spring flowers while a fashionable young lady looks on.
ArtCal picked “Tenderly” as a top show and it’s only up for a few more days, so get out there and see it.
Congrats to Eddie!
Straight from the Illustration Inbox, we have this update from Andrea Geller:
I am a Parsons graduate, Illustration department (1982) and would like to update you on what I’ve been working on…
1. An oil painting titled “Floating” [above] was selected for inclusion in the U.S. Department of State “Art in Embassies” program, Athens, Greece.
2. Completed interior book illustrations for “What to Say to a Porcupine” Amacom Books, NYC, July, 2008. [editor’s note: pre-order the book here!]
Congratulations, Andrea!
Alumni: As always, keep us updated!