Gender and art

On the occasion of her first New York solo show, Lynda Barry offers tips on keeping students engaged, tackling taboos, and learning to laugh at yourself .

Legendary cartoonist Lynda Barry has her first solo show in New York. “Everything: Part 1,”on view at Adam Baumgold Gallery through July 11, surveys Barry’s 35-year career as a leading figure in the post-punk, alternative-comics scene. Known for her distinctive DIY style—crude but evocative line drawings surrounded by swaths of hand-written narration—Barry has pushed boundaries in the male-dominated field of comics by highlighting the viewpoints of women and children and using humor to confront controversial subjects ranging from race to sexuality to abuse.

Lynda Barry
Everything: Part I

through July 11, 2014

Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York

http://adambaumgoldgallery.com/

"Provided how many famous creators had secret talents — including Richard Feynman’s drawings, Marilyn Monroe’s poetry, Rube Goldberg’s political art, and Liberace’s culinary powers — it comes as little surprise that one of the greatest twentieth-century authors was also a deft cartoonist, whose little-known and lovely drawings are collected in Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons."

The Cartoon Art Museum proudly presents Pretty In Ink: The Trina Robbins Collection, featuring highlights from the personal archives of legendary comics herstorian Trina Robbins. 

Pretty In Ink, published by Fantagraphics Books, is a revised, updated and rewritten history of North-American women cartoonists, building upon previous award-winning histories written by Robbins.  The Cartoon Art Museum’s retrospective of the same name has been assembled from Robbins’s own archives, and features many of the top women cartoonists from the early 20th century, including Ethel Hays, Edwina Dumm, Nell Brinkley, Ramona Fradon, and Lily Renée.  Original artwork, rare photographs, and other memorabilia will be included in this historic retrospective.

Pretty In Ink: The Trina Robbins Collection

April 26 – August 24, 2014

The Cartoon Art Museum, San Francisco

"This month, a fascinating set of documents was deposited at Sheffield Archives which will be of interest to students of history, politics and art alike - the records of Wildcat Cards.

Wildcat Cards was founded in Sep 1988 by the Sheffield-based cartoonist and graphic designer Fi Frances in order to make women's art more accessible to the public via high quality cards promoting images and messages by women for women.  The project related Fi’s skills in graphics and cartooning to the politics of feminism and other radical campaigns which she was involved in."

Trina Robbins -- feminist Underground Comix creator, writer, artist, publisher, editor and more -- has had a wide and storied career spanning nearly every part of the comic book industry. But outside her creative contributions, students of comics and pop culture know her as the preeminent scholar on women in graphic media, from comic strips to comic books, from the dawn of the Golden Age to the end of the Modern.

Now the woman who literally wrote the book (and then some) on female comics creators is back with what she calls her "definitive" history of women creators: "Pretty In Ink: North American Women Cartoonists 1896-2013," out this winter from Fantagraphics Books.

In anticipation of Robbins "final" book on the subject, CBR spoke with industry veteran about her research-ready text, including the myths surrounding women creators, the contemporary comics landscape and the engrossing yet complicated history of women in comics.