Illustration faculty member Wendy Popp has received a grant to coordinate an external project on Climate Change.  The Illustration program will be collaborating with  350.org, the international environmental organization on visual interpretaions that go beyond the scope of the polar bear and melting ice flow. 

All faculty members are invited to incorporate this project into their syllabus for the spring semester. 

All students are invited to develop ideas in any manner of interpretation from GIF to storyboard, comic to puppetry, animation to static image, poetry to musical interlude.

The first meeting and presentation with 350.org will be on Wednesday, January 25th in room D 1103 in 6 east 16th from 4:45 – 5:30pm.

The work that is generated will be presented in exhibition during Earth week and during a presentation for The Tishman Environmental Design Center in late April. 

It is our hope that the quantity and quality of the work that is generated will further the enhancement of the 350.org social media campaign. 

The project is open to all departments of Parsons The New School for Design.

If you can’t attend this meeting, please contact Wendy Popp for more information. poppw@newschool.edu

Orion Martin on The Largest Comics Industry Ever: China’s Pulp Comics

Beginning in Shanghai in the 1920s, a vibrant culture of mass produced comics developed in mainland China. These pocket-sized comics, called lianhuanhua, became one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the country and were printed in tremendous quantities. In 1985, the peak year of lianhuanhua production, more than eight billion comics were printed in genres ranging from historical parables to adaptations of Star Wars. Demand for the comics has decreased since the 1980s, but hundreds of thousands continue to circulate in antique stores and online.

R. Orion Martin is a writer and translator based in Brooklyn, New York. He writes about comics, art, and the ways new understandings of comics can make them more meaningful to our lives. His work has been featured on Hyperallergic, The Comics Journal, and The Hooded Utilitarian. You can find him on Tumblr or Twitter.

The 174th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, January 24, 2017 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby).

Free and open to the public.

Closing Reception: Todd Lambrix | A Broken Taxonomy

LIU Humanities Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
1 University Plaza, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Please join us at the opening reception of A Broken Taxonomy Thursday night, December 8th from 6-8 pm at The Humanities Gallery at LIU Brooklyn. We will have a limited edition, signed book from the show available for sale.

The individual specimens in A Broken Taxonomy are part alien spacecraft part stuffed toy, never quite crossing into cartoon character territory, however close to that line they might get. Instead they seem almost to belong closer to the world of miniature furniture: little modern ottomans or chaise loungers, with crafted wooden legs or wire stands, and however closely they skirt the edge of whimsey, they are still rather serious. – Glenn LaVertu | excerpt from the forthcoming book on the exhibition.

Cynthia Roman on “Hogarthian Progresses in Eighteenth-Century Graphic Satire”
 

Sequential narration in satiric prints is most famously associated with the “modern moral subjects” of William Hogarth (1697–1764): Harlot’s Progress (1732), A Rake’s Progress(1735), Marriage A-la-Mode (1745), and Industry and Idleness (1747) among others. Less well-known is the broad spectrum of legacy “progresses” produced by subsequent generations drawing both on Hogarth’s narrative strategies and his iconic motifs. James Gillray (1756–1815), celebrated for his innovative single-plate satires, was among the most accomplished printmakers to adopt Hogarthian sequential narration even as he transformed it according to his unique vision. Gillray’s forays into Hogarthian progresses kept the idiom relevant for further development by later graphic satirists including G.M. Woodward, Richard Newton, Charles Williams, Williams Elmes and George Cruikshank whose works will also be considered in this talk.

Cynthia Roman is Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings, The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. She is editor and contributor to Hogarth’s Legacy distributed by Yale University Press, 2016.

The 172nd meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, December 6, 2016 at 7pmat Parsons School of Design, The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public.

Congratulations to Parson’s Illustration’s Ben Katchor and Gabriella D’Alessandro for being featured in The New York Times Weekend Arts Gift Guide.

In the November 25th issue of The New York Times, class of 2010’s Gabriella D’Alessandro created the cover art for the two Weekend Arts sections and Illustration program director Ben Katchor’s “Cheap Novelties: The Pleasure of Urban Decay”, published by Drawn and Quarterly, is one of the recommended books in the Weekend Arts Gift Guide.

Two talks by Warren Bernard

1. Training The Armed Forces: The Work of Lt.  Robert Osborn and Sgt. Will Eisner

Some of the first large scale institutional training utilizing comics was by the Army and Navy in WW2. Lt Robert Osborn for the Navy and Sgt. Will Eisner for the Army created materials used to teach pilots, mechanics and front line troops how to properly use and care for their equipment. Both of them used their work on training materials during the war to refine their craft that was integrated into their post-war work.

2.  Before Pearl Harbor: Cartoons and Comics Respond to The War In Europe

This lecture focuses on how cartoons and comics reacted to global events during the run-up up to the opening of World War Two, as well as the two years of the war that the United States was a neutral power, prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941.  We will look at the movement  of the response to these events from the world of political cartoon on the editorial page to the pop culture worlds of comic books and comic strips, by looking at works by Milton Caniff, Milt Gross, Peter Arno, William Gropper, Herblock, Alex Raymond, Joe Shuster, Alex Schomberg, Winsor McCay, David Low, Jack Kirby and many others.

Warren Bernard is a comics historian as well as the Executive Director of Small Press Expo. Warren has written for The Comics Journal on the influential cartoonist John T. McCutcheon, as well as an extensive article with newly uncovered information about the Senate Comic Book Hearings. Last year Warren co-curated, with Bill Kartalopoulos, the successful and critically well-received retrospective on Alt-Weekly Comics at the Society of Illustrators. He has contributed research and images from his own extensive collection to over a dozen books on comics history. Warren has lectured on comics history at the The Center for Cartoon Studies and the Library of Congress, where as a long-time volunteer, he has cataloged over 1300 political cartoons. He recently released his first solo book, Cartoons for Victory from Fantagraphics, which is the story of the home front in the United States during World War II as told through comics and cartoons. His first book, Drawing Power, the story of cartoonists work in the advertising field, was co-written with Rick Marschall and nominated for an Eisner Award.

The 171st meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposiumwill be held on Tuesday, November 29, 2016 at 7pm at Parsons The New School for Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby).

Free and open to the public.