Inside North Korea screening on March 25th

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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

Steven Guarnaccia interviewed about ties, books, and everything!

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Parsons Illustration Chair Steven Guarnaccia was recently interviewed by Bradford Shellhammer over at the Sundance Channel’s Full Frontal Design blog.  They talked about Steven’s collection of Rooster ties, his children’s books, and his style in general.  Here’s a snippet from the interview:

B.S.: Aside from ties, what else do you collect?

S.G: At one point I had something like 39 discrete collections. I had to count because for a couple of years I was on Art and Antiques’ list of the 100 top collectors. I’ve calmed down a bit since then. But some of my other collections are black-and-white things (dice, dominoes, aces of spades, etc., about which I wrote a book for Chronicle called, oddly enough, Black and White), skeletons, vintage illustrated children’s books, and kids’ card games.

B.S.: You’re also a lover of modern design and architecture, as evidenced in your booksGoldilocks and the Three Bears: A Tale Moderne and The Three Little Pigs. What made you re-create these classic kids’ stories with a modernist slant?

S.G: I had been doing monthly stand-alone illustrations for Metropolitan Home and thenAbitare, in Italy, and became very interested in the history of modern furniture design and architecture. I was invited to contribute to a French exhibition about Russian children’s-book illustrator Feodor Rojankovsky. He had illustrated Goldilocks and the Three Bears for Golden Books, and as I reread the book, I realized what a little design critic Goldilocks is: This chair is too hard, this bed is too big. It came to me that I could illustrate the book using classic 20th-century furniture throughout the book and teach kids a soft lesson about design at the same time.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Way to go, Steven!

Great feature in the NYTimes on Jonathan Levine Gallery

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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!)

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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!

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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

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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 →

Illustration Alums sign their new Ugly Doll at GR2!

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Giant Robot is pleased to present an appearance by UglyDolls creators, Parsons Illustration Alums David Horvath and Sun-min Kim, who will be signing a “brand-new” piece, the 2002 Ice Bat.

In 2001, Sun-min turned a drawing on the bottom of letters from David into a hand-sewn doll. It was Wage, the first Uglydoll ever. After David brought the piece to the newly opened Giant Robot store, it evolved into a toy with a rabid following–selling out at shops around the world, appearing in movies, creating spin-offs, spawning bootlegs, and inspiring a new wave of stuffed plushes.

Regarding the newest UglyDoll, Horvath explains, “In 2002, Sun-min sewed the first few Ice-Bats with toes, bright blue fur, and five teeth! Ever since, photos have popped up and requests to make him have come in, so we are creating a couple hundred production versions just for Giant Robot. They will be released at the GR store on Sawtelle on the day of our signing.”

Customers are limited to buying three pieces at the signing. The limited edition of 300 will be also available at the Giant Robot stores in San Francisco and New York, as well as giantrobot.com, at 12:00 noon on the same day, with the same limit of three pieces.

The signing will take place on March 6 from 3:00 – 5:00 PM at GR2.

Giant Robot Los Angeles ~ UglyDoll signing at GR2
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Time:  3:00pm – 5:00pm

GR2
2062 Sawtelle Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA

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

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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!

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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.