Lynda Barry “What Is It and Other Works”

Adam Baumgold Gallery (60 E 66th St.)

poster for Lynda Barry “What Is It and Other Works”
[Image: Lynda Barry Lynda Barry"Cover, 2006 What It Is" Ink, watercolor, mixed media collage on paper 11" x 8 1/2 in.]

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Adam Baumgold Gallery presents What It Is, the fourth New York solo exhibition at the gallery of famed cartoonist Lynda Barry from September 8th through October 28th. The exhibition will feature over 60 never before exhibited drawing collages from Barry’s 2008 book What It Is, as well as many of her original comic drawings published in Raw, The Village Voice, Esquire, Newsweek and The New York Times over the past 35 years. Also included in the exhibition will be work from Lynda Barry’s seminal books Two Sisters Comeek, Girls and Boys, Big Ideas, The Fun House, It’s So Magic, The Greatest of Marlys and Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book.

Lynda Barry’s genre defying work What It Is won the comic industry’s 2009 Eisner Award for Best Reality Based Work. Equal-parts guidebook and manifesto, it questions what it means to write and draw pictures—examining every step from how the mind creates images to how the pen hits the page. Chasing the big question on the cover itself, (“What Is an Image?”) Barry dives down the rabbit hole by posing a series of other big questions. For example, one drawings asks “Can Images Exist Without Thinking?” followed by, “Can Thinking Exist Without Images?” Another asks “Where Is a Story Before It Becomes Words?”, and so on.

The richly textured collages mix lines culled from textbooks and old children’s books, envelope lists and school exercises, into Barry’s nimble comic drawings. Here, Lynda Barry’s canvas is lined, yellow legal paper, evoking the fluid movement possible between writing and drawing: the pairing central to the tradition of comic art. Vanity Fair describes the project as “a bathysphere-like odyssey through the depths of her funky subconscious.”

What It Is grapples especially with how, somewhere on the road from childhood to adulthood, we lose our confidence and sense of ease expressing ourselves on paper. In his review of What It Is in the Boston Globe, Dan Wasserman dubbed it “the moment around sixth grade when someone in the class gets anointed ‘the artist’ and everyone else stops drawing.” The latter half of drawings from the book seek to dislodge these hang-ups and inhibitions, with generous anecdotes, exercises, jokes, and advice from Barry’s own creative process.

Lynda Barry first created Ernie Pook’s Comeek in 1979 at age 23. It became a syndicated alternative weekly comic strip that ran for over 20 years, in 200 newspapers. In addition to her comic works, Barry has written two illustrated novels. She later adapted The Good Times Are Killing Me into a Broadway play. She has received two Will Eisner awards, The American Library association’s Alex award, the Washington State governor’s award, the Wisconsin Library Associations RR Donnelly Award. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum and the The Library of Congress, among others. Barry lives and works in Wisconsin where she is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin (Madison).

Media

Schedule

from September 08, 2017 to October 28, 2017

Artist(s)

Lynda Barry

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