NYAB Event - "Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women" Exhibition

"Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women" Exhibition

Yeshiva University Museum

This event has ended.

The genre-bending influence of Jewish women in comics will get a rare spotlight as the acclaimed Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women exhibition arrives at Yeshiva University Museum (YU Museum).

Featuring original work by 18 of the most influential creators, Graphic Details showcases work of all- stars from the pioneering Wimmen’s Comix and Twisted Sisters artists of the 1970s and 1980s to the superstars of the new generation. Many of the cartoons in Graphic Details have never been displayed in public until now. The artists, who hail from the U.S., Canada, Israel and the UK include: Vanessa Davis; Bernice Eisenstein; Sarah Glidden; Miriam Katin; Aline Kominsky-Crumb; Miss Lasko-Gross; Sarah Lazarovic; Miriam Libicki; Sarah Lightman; Diane Noomin; Corinne Pearlman; Trina Robbins; Racheli Rotner; Sharon Rudahl; Laurie Sandell; Ariel Schrag; Lauren Weinstein; and Ilana Zeffren.

This well-reviewed and often-startling exhibition makes its New York City debut after successful runs in San Francisco and Toronto, and provides the first in-depth look at a vibrant and prolific niche of graphic storytelling – Jewish women’s autobiographical comics. While the influential role of Jews in cartooning has long been acknowledged, the role of Jewish women in shaping the medium is still largely unexplored. This exhibition of original drawings, full comic books and graphic novels presents the powerful work of artists whose intimate and complex work has influenced the world of comics over the last four decades.

Sophisticated yet raw, nakedly diaristic storytelling is what makes these comics so compelling. By turns funny, outrageous, poignant and embarrassingly intimate, the works reflect each artist’s individual journeys refracted through a distinctively Jewish lens in a pop-culture art form. Some bare their bodies. Some expose their psyches. All are fearless about experiences, emotions, desires, romance and politics.

“YU Museum is proud to host the powerful work of these artists who have not, until recently, been recognized for their important role in the world of graphic storytelling and new modern forms of Jewish autobiography,” said Dr. Jacob Wisse, YU Museum director.

Graphic Details is co-curated by Michael Kaminer, a New York journalist and collector whose December 2008 story on confessional comics in The Jewish Daily Forward provided the impetus for the show. His collaborator, Sarah Lightman, is an award-winning artist, curator and arts journalist based in London who is researching her Ph.D. on Autobiography in Comics. In his article, Kaminer noted that, “While women have been writing frank confessional cartoons since the early 1970s, the context has changed. Brutal sexism defined underground comics back then, with females depicted as fawning objects for a largely male readership... Today’s autobiographical comics come as less of a cultural jolt...These young artists are just as ruthlessly honest, presenting their bodies as nakedly as their emotions.”
YU Museum will host several public events and programs to meet the curators and some of the artists throughout the run of Graphic Details, which closes on April 15, 2012.