Josh Neufeld's Blog, page 12

Rubin Museum Karma-Con “Artists on Art” Talk… Take Two

I was all sent last month to lead a talk at the Rubin Museum when I suffered an untimely injury. I dislocated my kneecap and ruptured my patella tendon playing basketball, and had to have surgery. After being laid up in the hospital for four days, I’m now back home, but am sporting a full-leg fiberglass cast on my left leg (which I’ll have to endure until at least March 30).

But that won’t stop me from going through with my planned talk! This Friday, March 16, we’ll try again. In conjunction with the current exhibition, Gateway to Himalayan Art, I’ll pick out a few pieces from the show that strike me or form some connection with my own practice. And I’ll be accompanied during the event by assistant curator Beth Citron—as I mentioned before, someone actually qualified to discuss South Asian art. I should be able to hobble through this without too much trouble.

Here are details:

Artists on Art

Friday, March 16, 2012, 6:15pm — FREE!

Rubin Museum of Art

150 W. 17th Street

New York, NY

Meet at the base of the spiral staircase

The “Artist on Art” series is part of the Museum’s self-styled “Karma-Con.” Part two, the “Studio Salon,” takes place the following Wednesday, March 21. For that event, myself and a group of other local cartoonists/illustrators will reinterpret segments of the Tibetan Wheel of Life (also known as the Wheel of Becoming, a representation of Buddhist beliefs about life, death, and rebirth).

Molly Crabapple, Ben Granoff, Michael Kupperman, Katie Skelly, and I will create initial sketches, sell and sign our work, and share our creative processes in an open studio setting, complete with cocktails. This event is specifically tied to another Rubin exhibition, Hero, Villain, Yeti: Tibet in Comics. I should be able to prop myself up somewhere, leg sticking out awkwardly, to do some preliminary sketching.

Karma-Con part 3, “The Unveiling,” will take place April 18; further details to come. By then I should be completely able-bodied again!

Here’s more info about the Studio Salon. I hope to see you at both the “Artists on Art’ event and the “Studio Salon.”

Nick Flynn’s BEING FLYNN… the back story

I first met Nick Flynn back in the fall of 1999, in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I had accompanied Sari there for her Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, a residency which would keep us in P-town through the winter and into the following spring. Nick was a second-year fellow, and Sari and I were immediately drawn to his charm, intelligence, and good humor.

Nick was a natural storyteller, and had some amazing stories to tell, about a life filled with drama, heartbreak, debauchery—all that good stuff. By trade, he was a poet—a good one—and over the years he and I did some collaborations, basically me adapting his poems into comics. One of the pieces, “Father Outside,” had to do with the time Nick was working in a homeless shelter and his long-estranged father arrived as a new client. Another piece, “Bag of Mice,” dealt with Nick’s mother’s suicide. In all, we did three collaborations, all of which were published in literary journals (and later published my me in The Vagabonds #2). The original art from our first piece, “Cartoon Physics, Part One,” even traveled as part of a multi-city comics art exhibition.

In 2004, Nick published a memoir, memorably titled Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. (That was a favorite phrase of his father’s.) Nick hoped to collaborate again with me on the cover of the book (which was being published by W.W. Norton, much later to be my publisher for The Influencing Machine.) So we worked together on some sketches. Long story short, Norton declined to use my art for the cover (though it was eventually published as a frontspiece in the British Faber & Faber edition). And I have to admit that the art they used instead, by Hon-Sum Cheng, is far superior.

So, fast forward eight years, and Nick’s book has been made into a feature film. Now called Being Flynn (you can see why they didn’t use the other title), it stars Paul Dano as Nick and the legendary Robert DeNiro as Nick’s father. Julianne Moore makes an appearance as Nick’s mom—not a bad cast! The film opened last week, so to commemorate it, I’m sharing the book’s rejected cover art.

Lila Quintero Weaver’s DARKROOM

Last fall I was sent a manuscript copy of Darkroom: A Memoir in Black & White, a graphic novel memoir by newcomer Lila Quintero Weaver. In 1961, when Lila was five, she and her family emigrated from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Marion, Alabama, in the heart of Alabama’s Black Belt. As educated, middle-class Latino immigrants in a region that was defined by segregation, the Quinteros occupied a privileged vantage from which to view the racially charged culture they inhabited. Weaver and her family were first-hand witnesses to key moments in the civil rights movement. But Darkroom is her personal story as well: chronicling what it was like being a Latina girl in the Jim Crow South, struggling to understand both a foreign country and the horrors of our nation’s race relations. Weaver, who was neither black nor white, observed very early on the inequalities in the American culture, with its blonde and blue-eyed feminine ideal. Throughout her life, Lila has struggled to find her place in this society and fought against the discrimination around her.

Darkroom is an impressive debut work. A memoir in the vein of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby, Weaver’s mesmerizing tale is matched by her accomplished drawing and design skills. Darkroom is the story of a childhood, of a Latino immigrant family, of the struggle for justice in the Deep South. Weaver’s appealing pencil renderings perfectly capture the book’s themes of being caught in the middle, witness to (and participant in) one of the most turbulent periods in American history.

Darkroom is out now from the University of Alabama Press. Here’s a link to buying a copy.