Category Archives: News

Drawing Art & Politics: A panel discussion @ Museum of the City of New York

Events, General Info, Illustration Industry, News

feiffer undergore!

Drawing Art and Politics:
Jules Feiffer, David Levine, Stan Mack, and Edward Sorel

Spend an evening with New York’s renowned graphic artists Jules Feiffer, David Levine, Stan Mack, and Edward Sorel, as they examine the ways in which complex social and political issues are depicted by artists in today’s media. Jules Feiffer will moderate a discussion that explores the roots of political art and social realism in the context of John Sloan’s early 20th-century illustrations of New Yorkers engaging in routine pastimes and pleasures.

Tuesday • February 5 • 6:30 PM
 Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY
212.534.1672, ext. 3395

Reservations Required
$9 for General Admission
$5 for Museum members, Seniors, and Students

[image by Jules Feiffer]

Eddie del Rosario’s work in “Narrations” at Nancy Margolis Gallery

Exhibitions, General Info, Illustration Faculty, News, , , , ,
del rosario for margolis
“Contremps 1” study

Illustration adjunct faculty Eddie del Rosario has works featured in “Narrations,” an exhibition opening tonight, January 17th, at Nancy Margolis Gallery here in New York City. Here’s an excerpt from the gallery’s press release:

The Nancy Margolis Gallery is to exhibit works on paper by seven artists who create visual stories pulled from the subconscious, observations of reality, personal symbolism, and fictional fantasies. The simple materials, graphite, paint, and paper require little preparation for the artist to get started. The seven artists in Narrations are gifted draftsmen/women, and the work shows exacting concentration in spite of the spontaneous nature of the medium. Be they light and funny, dark and frightening, the outcome is carefully drafted minimalist drawings of quirky, strange, ambiguous scenes and figures.

Edward del Rosario, a Brooklyn based artist who received his M.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design, is known for his paintings featuring miniature people engaging in full-size power struggles. Rosario’s work displays the absurd games people are willing to play to obtain and preserve power within cultural clashes. Del Rosario received a 2007 MacDowell Fellowship, and his work can be seen in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

If you are in the New York Area, make sure to stop by and see Eddie’s work, as well as all the other pieces on display.

“Narrations”
January 17th – March 1st
Nancy Margolis Gallery
Tel: 212.242.3013
523 West 25th Street (between 10th Ave and 11th Ave)
New York, NY 10001
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 10am-6pm

Illustration faculty co-hosts BCAT show about children’s books

Events, Illustration Faculty, Illustration Industry, Interviews, News, , , , , , ,
selznick cummings and BCAT

If you’re the NYC area, don’t miss this great program, co-hosted by Illustration faculty Pat Cummings. Brian Selznick will discuss his award-winning children’s books, his artistic process, and his experiences in the illustration industry. Should be very enlightening!

The Invention of Hugo Cabret
featuring Brian Selznick (and Pat Cummings)
BCAT (Time Warner ch. 34 & Cablevision ch. 67)
January 19th at 11:00 a.m.

Parsons Illustration Faculty included in Society of Illustrators show

Exhibitions, General Info, Illustration Alumni, Illustration Faculty, News, , , , , , ,
billout anti-war

Several artists affiliated with Parsons Illustration are featured in “Artists Against the War“, a show presented by The Society of Illustrators in collaboration The Nation magazine. Parsons faculty members Wendy Popp and Guy Billout, as well as Illustration alum Peter Kuper all have works on view.

kuper anti-art

The official press release reads:

This show is the expression of over 60 of the top graphic artists and illustrators working in the United States and abroad whose anguish has compelled them to produce works that challenge the self-destructive ignorance, indifference, incompetence and corruption that is the result of US Middle East foreign policy. These works of art will give a voice to those whose views are not represented by the mainstream media. We will be using this forum as a way to support those most directly affected by the harsh consequences of military combat—the brave men and women who serve their country as well as their family members who must live with the affects of war long after the parades are over.

You can view images from the online show here and/or visit the Society before the show closes on January 26th, 2008. Additionally, there will be a panel discussion called, “The Media: The First Casualty in Iraq” which takes place Wednesday, January 23rd at 7 p.m. ($10/$6 for students).

popp anti-war

The Society of Illustrators
128 East 63rd Street (between Park and Lexington Avenues)
New York, NY 10021-7303
Tel: (212) 838-2560
E-Mail: info@societyillustrators.org

[Images by Guy Billout, Peter Kuper, and Wendy Popp.]

Illustration//Design Within Reach Bellini Chair project gets written up in Interior Design magazine

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bellini chairs at design within reach

Interior Design magazine recently featured a brief write-up of the Bellini Chair collaboration between Illustration students and Design Within Reach. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Sari Widman won first prize for her Fluff chair, which encapsulates a Bellini chair in wire, fabric, and cotton. “I have a bit of a fantasy of being hugged and carried around by a huge, fluffy white monster when I get stressed out or tired,” says Widman. “I wanted to make a chair that would feel like that, and also the opportunity to build something because I draw all the time but rarely get to work in three dimensions.” Other winning designs include See no Sit by Chris Yip and This is Where by Christina Young.

Read the rest of the article here and don’t forget that the chairs are on view until January 20th, so there’s still a chance to see them in person! Congratulations to Sari and all the other Illustration students involved and thanks again to Kenna Kay and Bradford Shellhammer of Design Within Reach for facilitating this exciting project.

Design Within Reach
408 West 14th Street
(between 9th and 10th Ave.)
New York, NY 10014
[photo by Michael DiVito]

Illustration Alumna Leah Hayes does McSweeney’s cover art!

Illustration Alumni, News, Publications, , ,
leah hayes mcsweeney’s
Parsons Illustration alumna Leah Hayes created the front and back cover art for McSweeney’s 25, a quarterly journal of sorts that features a wide range of literary and artistic endeavors including illustrated fables, sketchbooks, short stories, audio recordings, and comics. This issue is described as:
If issues were anniversaries, this one would have to be printed on silver plates. You could melt it in some sort of forge and then pound it on an anvil until you had a set of earrings. Instead, it’s a hardcover book with stories by a few of our old favorites—Steven Millhauser, Joyce Carol Oates, Padgett Powell—and more than half a dozen others, investigating everything from ape men to unlucky island-hoppers to what happens when Canadians go AWOL in Bosnia. Pound this one on an anvil and it’ll pound you right back.
Grab your copy of Leah’s fantastic cover (and McSweeney’s wonderful content) at the McSweeney’s store and don’t forget about her upcoming full-length graphic novel, Funeral of the Heart, which we wrote about in our holiday gift guide this past December.  Good work, Leah!

From the Vault: Illustration Alum Jill Bliss Rallies to Keep Gocco Alive!

From the Vault, General Info, Illustration Alumni, Illustration Industry, News

save gocco!

Back in October, an article in the New York Times discussed Parsons Illustration Alumna Jill Bliss and her efforts to revive production of Gocco printers. What is Gocco, you ask? According to Jill’s site…

In the 1970’s Noboru Hayama, a printer and the japanese inventor of the “print gocco” system, wished to develop a quick and easy household color printing system. cleverly combining the basic priciples of screenprinting and rubber-stamping, “print gocco” is a clean, easy, and fully self-contained compact system that exposes and prints all in one unit.

And here is an excerpt from the New York Times article, written by Rob Walker:

Turns out that Print Gocco is both better known and somehow cooler than it has ever been here. And this is almost certainly because in late 2005, the Riso Kagaku Corporation, now an international and largely digital business, announced that Gocco was dead.It was this surprise announcement that inspired Jill Bliss to start a Web site called Save Gocco, which became a centerpiece of a product-fandom community (or at least a cult). Bliss, who used a Gocco machine she bought on eBay in her handmade stationery business, Blissen, says she threw together the site “on a whim.” She handed out some press packets at the Bazaar Bizarre craft fair in Los Angeles, and soon SaveGocco.com became ground zero of Gocco-withdrawal angst. The site ultimately collected more than a thousand names of enthusiasts, in a show of strength that the signers hoped might inspire some entity to start making the product again. It also carried news of Gocco art shows that started to pop up, and it listed retail resources. Wang says interest in the process among artists and crafters was already gaining momentum when word got out that the device was going to disappear. “Then there was just this urgency,” she recalls, “to find a Gocco.”

Read the rest of the article here. Visit SaveGocco.com for more information about Gocco printing.

If you live on the West Coast, don’t miss Jill Bliss’s show, currently at Giant Robot in Los Angeles. See more of her work and wares at her personal website.

(image from SaveGocco.com)

Illustration students written up in Design Notes

Events, Exhibitions, Illustration Dept. Events, Illustration Industry, News, , , , ,

rej ahmed bellini chair

A Commentary on Laziness, Rejwan Ahmed

There’s a great account of the collaboration between Parsons Illustration’s Bellini chair project and Design Within Reach in the most recent issue of DWR’s newsletter, Design Notes, which reaches a whopping 400,000 readers. Bradford Shellhammer discusses the genesis of the project and how it all plays out. Here’s an excerpt:

The class took some time to warm up to the chairs. Skateboards are instantly recognizable by undergrads, but most had yet to even purchase a new chair. [Kenna] Kay, who works by day as a creative director for TV Land, instructed them to research the history of the chair and follow up with a design statement. Steps were mapped out: Move from statement to sketch to model to final design. During each stage we met for a classroom critique. We talked openly and honestly about each idea and encouraged students to refine and better articulate their designs.

The first round of sketches included such diverse ideas as covering the chair in cushions and peacock feathers or attaching a bent spine to the chair to illustrate the negative impact a seated position can have on the human back. Some ideas were political and thought provoking, others were purely decorative. Some students had impressive concepts from day one, while others grew stronger and stronger with each passing week. Some ideas stuck (the chair with the spine) and some fell by the wayside (sayonara, peacock feathers), but all have remained truly original. The designs are as diverse as the students who created them.

Read the entirety of Bradford’s account, as well as see more images of the students’ work, in Design Notes and don’t forget about the exhibition of the completed chairs, which opens with a reception on December 12th and continues through January 20th.