I'm not a comics follower, though I have followed what I call cartoons, sometimes for years. I do love shoes, though, even those I can't wear.
But I just ran across this article in my local news/google update, and thought it was interesting.
http://sfreporter.com/articles/publish/va-review-052808-comic-collections.php
From the Santa Fe Reporter --
Comic Collections
By Zane Fischer
Published: May 28, 2008
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The caped crusaders of art show off their true identities.
I always knew I should have held onto that sprawling, half-decayed collection of comic books that I assembled between about age 6 and, uh, a later date. Now it's clear that clinging to sketchy comic remnants has left the realm of living in parents' basement and entered the domain of serious curators and art collectors.
Rose Simpson rocks comic-oriented art exhibitions at both 516 Arts and MIAC. (Rose Simpson, "Reservation" 2008)
Once upon a time, there were comics and there was art. The two barely mingled, despite some grudging mutual respect and some obvious connections. Then there was the gruff acknowledgement that low brow, i.e., comics, could participate on equal footing, within appropriate contexts, with high-brow art.
High-brow art's embrace of the comic is evident in two regional exhibitions, one in Albuquerque, one in Santa Fe, both with overlapping implications and at least one shared artist. Snap Crackle Pow!, curated by Santa Fe writer and art historian Kathryn Davis, collects some of the most distinct and notable young artists from Santa Fe and its surroundings at Albuquerque's 516 Arts, while Comic Art Indigéne, at Santa Fe's Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC), takes a focused look at the varied relationships between comics and Native American art iconographies.
Snap Crackle Pow! is so balanced, equitable and professional in its elegant setting that it looks and smells too much like art: It could almost be a corporate lobby, which does little to serve the energy and roots behind the work. The inclusion of work by R Crumb is a predictable and pat contextualization of tenuous value that fails to enhance the work of these already-relevant artists.
Further?-not that catalog essays should have any real bearing on one's experience of an exhibition?-Davis needs to be called out for spending the bulk of her essay talking up feminism, then admitting to holding a "boy's club" of an exhibition and, finally, claiming that the best way to talk about the comic and pop experience of the women she's included in the show is by first talking about the men in the show. And she never does get around to addressing the women's experiences.
Beyond these points, however, the works are well-selected and almost magically representational of New Mexico's role in a key shift in art practice. As Albuquerque-based artist Larry Bob Phillips' statement says, "My work also owes much of its grounding to recent shifts in thinking and looking
such as
SNAP CRACKLE POW!: AN EXHIBITION OF DRAWINGS
Through May 31
516 Arts
516 Central Avenue SW
Albuquerque
(505) 242-1445
COMIC ART INDIGÉNE
Through Jan. 4, 2009
Museum of Indian Arts and Culture
710 Camino Lejo
476-1250
the mind-numbing sensory overload that has been the hallmark of the new psychedelia and the pervasiveness of the graphic novel in recent years. All of these developments constitute in my mind an exciting break with the past."
Phillips' work takes the big physicality of traditional, painterly expressionism and catapults it into drawings of a more membranous, interior sensuality. The works are friendly cartoon spatters, secondarily and almost secretly populated by strange, intuitive beings.
A Phillips cohort from Albuquerque's Donkey Gallery (and director of the College of Santa Fe Fine Arts Gallery), David Leigh comes from a similar school of thought in that his color-infused drawings meander through a forest of figurative, abstract and scribbled elements by intuitive association.
Santa Feans Clayton Porter and Luke Dorman plumb their respective themes of mythology and history with gritty comic aplomb. Dorman exhibits color lithographs made at Tamarind Institute. Maureen Burdock offers a stylistic blend between the two, with a refreshingly narrative, almost magical realist focus.
Rose Simpson, who both Santa Fe and Albuquerque would like to claim, but who really belongs to Santa Clara Pueblo, provides punctuation by way of her stark graphic panels and contemporary-genre portrayals of modern life.
Simpson's work is also prominently displayed in Santa Fe, at MIAC's Comic Art Indigéne. An even more historically deep-seated exhibition, a line is drawn from pictoraphs to graphic novels, from Native storytelling traditions to contemporary comic pantheons. A selection of historic cartoons, comics, Native ledger book paintings and illustration is balanced with contemporary iterations and appropriations by Simpson, Marcus Amerman, Diego Romero, Mateo Romero, Ryan Huna Smith, Jason Garcia and Jolene Yazzie.
The work varies from illustrated panels to beaded jewelry and small ceramics, borrowing from pop and sub-cultural icons to reinvent Pueblo storytelling or address contemporary Native issues. Comic Art is an affirmation?-yet again?-that the current generation of Native artists are clinging to the most key tradition of their cultures ?'creative heritage: To always be inventing and reinventing. The era of stereotyped and static "Indian art" is truly over, as is the "dominant" culture's hold on sophisticated, contextual and conceptual artmaking. A central space in the MIAC exhibition is reserved for sitting down and making your own comics, thus inviting viewers to extend the storytelling space beyond the museum walls.
Both of these comic-oriented exhibitions reveal critical components of contemporary trends in art, and of New Mexico's unique position within that trend. Anyone who fails to make the 516 Arts show before it closes ought to nab a copy of the catalog and take it along for the ride at MIAC.
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