Colette Gatier on Emory Douglas:
50 years of Revolutionary Art

Colette Gaiter will talk about former Black Panther party artist, designer, and illustrator Emory Douglas’s work on The Black Panther newspaper in the 1960s and 70s. His subversive and proactive political cartoons and drawings visualized a movement and galvanized activism that persists into the twenty-first century.

Colette Gaiter is an Associate Professor teaching Visual Communication at the University of Delaware. After working in graphic design she became an educator, artist, and writer, exhibiting her work internationally and in galleries, museums, and public institutions in the United States. She wrote the introduction for the second edition of Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, which also contains her essay on his work. Since 2004, she continues to write about Douglas’s work including his current international human rights activism.

Martha Rust on
Circles, Lines, and Coils:
Picturing Life Stories in Medieval Manuscripts and Rolls.

The set of all points in a plane that are equidistant from a given point, a circle is also an image of totality and completeness. Any two points in the circumference of a circle define a line, making a line the figure of connection and also of boundaries. A version of a circle, a coil suggests cycles as well as wholeness. By way of a separate etymology, “coil” also denotes the busy tumult of life, the “mortal coil” made famous by Shakespeare. All three of these design elements feature in medieval images and diagrams depicting typical life stories and exemplary life practices that were meant to aid a viewer in successfully negotiating that busy tumult. Among these works, images of the Wheel of Fortune are primarily pictorial while Wheel of Sevens diagrams based on the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer are primarily textual. In between are diagrams that feature a smaller circular element, the roundel. A look at the use roundels in a range of contexts–in stained glass, in Books of Hours, in genealogies–demonstrates that unlike the all-encompassing circle, the roundel isolates specific items of information and lends them visual emphasis.The use of roundels in a diagram displaying the ten stages of human life renders each a subject of contemplation, even as the lines connecting all ten roundels to a central hub pictures an individual life as part of a larger cycle. By contrast, the use of roundels of the “Pater Noster Table” in the Vernon Manuscript creates a visual hierarchy of information, in which the content of the roundels not only have priority over the lines of text that connect them but also become subject to a viewer’s mental manipulation.

Martha Rust is an associate professor of English at New York University, specializing in late-medieval English literature and manuscript culture. Her first book, Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix (Palgrave, 2007) envisioned the confines of a medieval manuscript as the potential territory of a virtual world; her current book project, Item: Lists and the Poetics of Reckoning in Late-Medieval England theorizes the list as a device that enables thinking in a variety of modes. She has also written about comics and picture stories in an essay entitled “It’s a Magical World: The Page in Comics and Medieval Manuscripts.”

The 161st meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2016 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby).

Free and open to the public.

As part of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium Parsons is happy to welcome our upcoming guest Seymour Chwast!

“Many of my illustrations and work that I do for myself fall under these categories. The subjects are graphically important to me.”
– Seymour Chwast on GOD WAR SEX

Seymour Chwast is co-founder of Push Pin Studios and has been director of the Pushpin Group where he reintroduced graphic styles and transformed them into a contemporary vocabulary.  His designs and illustrations have been used in advertising, animated films, and editorial, corporate, and environmental graphics.  He has created over 100 posters and has designed and illustrated more than thirty children’s books.  His work has been the subject of three books including, Seymour Chwast: The Left Handed Designer (Abrams, 1985).  Many museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Library of Congress (Washington D.C.) have collected his posters.  He has lectured and exhibited worldwide and is in the Art Directors Hall of Fame. He is the recipient of the 1985 Medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts.