Community Festival, aka ComFest, will collaborate with Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum and its current exhibit, Tales From la Vida: Latinx Comics, for a special fundraising event. The event will raise funds for CRIS and ETSS, and will feature an opening lecture by Frederick Luis Aldama, curator of the exhibit with Jenny Robb. A series of guided tours during the event will highlight the program.
Past Events
- Artist Talk with Leila Abdelrazaq March 28, 2019
Leila Abdelrazaq is a Palestinian author and artist born in Chicago and currently living in Detroit. Her debut graphic novel, Baddawi (Just World Books 2015) was shortlisted for the 2015 Palestine Book Awards and has been translated into three languages. She is also the author and Illustrator of The Opening (Tosh Fesh, 2017) as well as a number of zines and short comics. Her creative work primarily explores issues related to diaspora, refugees, history, memory, and borders. She is co-founder of Maamoul Press, a multi-disciplinary collective for the creation, curation, and dissemination of art by marginalized creators whose work lies at intersections of comics, print making, and book arts.
In this artist talk which forms part of the Borders in Motion Symposium, Leila will share images from her career as an artist and writer and talk about how her thinking about borders, nationalism, and national identity have shifted over time. She will share how this shift is reflected in how she approaches her work and tells stories.
FREE and open to the public.
A book signing will follow the presentation. Leila Abdelrazaq’s work will be available for purchase.
This event is cosponsored by Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, and made possible by funding from a Migration, Mobility, and Immobility grant.
- Frenchy Lunning: Seeking the Shôjo Through an Ecology of Desire March 20, 2019
-There is no single image or iconic aspect of the shôjo…but you know it when you see it.
FUJIMOTO YukariIt is impossible not to notice the perplexing multitude of contradictions to be found in the materiality of the highly patriarchal culture of contemporary Japan. It is paradoxically encrusted — overpoweringly — with the consuming evidence of the feminine; and not just any feminine, but specifically the young, cute, endearing femininity of the shôjo. Her trace is everywhere, and yet, who or what is she? Travelling through the postwar emergence and consequent proliferation, transformations, and translations of shôjo manga first in Japan, but ultimately globally; this discussion will investigate its various representations, as well as the many scholarly explanations, definitions, and descriptions of the shôjo in order to arrive at a notion of what is, at this moment, the tentative center of what might be understood as a rhizomic ecology of desire. Although various origins, endings, and subterranean mysteries can be plotted deep in its short (perhaps) history, nevertheless, this discussion will grab at the objects entangled in our present that are redolent with shôjo history, texts, images, meanings, and inferences, as they bob up into our view. Inevitably, of course, we will end with more questions than when we began, as she, by nature of her changing temporality and multiplicity, will always evade a definitive profile; yet it is worth the journey.
This event is FREE and open to the public. Let us know you’re coming on Facebook
- 2019 Will Eisner Week Comic Studies Forum March 7, 2019
Join us for the 2nd annual Will Eisner Week Comics Studies Forum at The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum! Come hear from comics scholars on their most recent work in the field.
Our feature presentation will be from Kate Polak, entitled “Displacing the Memorial: Holocaust Comics in Conversation with Memory.” Kate Polak is Assistant Professor of English at Wittenberg University, where she teaches literature and writing. Her book, Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics, was nominated for an Eisner Award. Her current projects include a book on Holocaust memorialization in the digital age, essays on the #metoo movement, and a graphic memoir.
- A Collaboration with ComFest Celebrating Tales From la Vida: Latinx Comics, the book and exhibit March 2, 2019
- Celebrating the Life and Art of Barbara Shermund with Liza Donnelly February 7, 2019
Join us on Thursday, February 7th at 6:30pm for a program and reception celebrating Barbara Shermund, the subject of our current exhibit, Tell Me A Story Where The Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund, on display through March 31st at The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.
6:30pm, Jean and Charles Schulz Lecture Hall: Presentation by New Yorker cartoonist and resident cartoonist of CBS News, Liza Donnelly, on cartoonists who are women who have worked at The New Yorker. Introduction by Dr. Judith Yaross Lee, author of Defining New Yorker Humor. Opening remarks by Amanda Gormley, art collector and niece of Barbara Shermund.
7:30pm: Reception, exhibit viewing, and book signing for Liza Donnelly’s Funny Ladies: The New Yorker’s Greatest Women Cartoonists and Their Cartoons
Please note: our galleries will remain open from 1:00pm to 8:30pm on February 7th for exhibit viewing before and after the program.
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