'Maus' used in Naval Medical Center Portsmouth's Holocaust education

NMCP HOSTS HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE CEREMONY
04.07.2022
Photo by Seaman Ariana Torman
Naval Medical Center - Portsmouth
 

220407-N-BB298-1009 Naval Medical Center Portsmouth's (NMCP) Diversity Committee hosted a Holocaust Remembrance ceremony in the command's Chapel of Comfort, April 7. The display of Holocaust memorabilia included literature and poems, along with viewing a video about the Holocaust.

Date Taken: 04.07.2022

Date Posted: 04.11.2022 13:53
Photo ID: 7137403
VIRIN: 220407-N-BB298-1009
Resolution: 5196x3712
Size: 2.16 MB

Location: PORTSMOUTH, VA, US   

 

 

 

220407-N-BB298-1032 Naval Medical Center Portsmouth’s (NMCP) Diversity Committee hosted a Holocaust Remembrance ceremony in the command’s Chapel of Comfort, April 7. NMCP’s leadership triad including Capt. Shelley Perkins, commanding officer; Capt. Joel Schofer, executive officer; Master Chief Michele Sullivan, command master chief; and other staff members, participated in a walk through of Holocaust memorabilia to include literature and poems, along with viewing a video about the Holocaust.

Date Taken: 04.07.2022

Date Posted: 04.11.2022 13:54
Photo ID: 7137407
VIRIN: 220407-N-BB298-1043
Resolution: 4920x2885
Size: 2.62 MB

Location: PORTSMOUTH, VA, US 

https://www.dvidshub.net/news/418269/nmcp-hosts-holocaust-remembrance-ceremony

Review: Sense of Humor exhibit at National Gallery of Art

by Mike Rhode

Sense of Humor: Caricature, Satire, and the Comical from Leonardo to the Present. Jonathan Bober, Andrew W. Mellon senior curator of prints and drawings; Judith Brodie, curator and head of the department of American and modern prints and drawings; and Stacey Sell, associate curator, department of old master drawings. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. July 15, 2018 – January 6, 2019. https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2018/sense-of-humor.html

The National Gallery of Art describes its first exhibit of cartoon art thusly:

Humor may be fundamental to human experience, but its expression in painting and sculpture has been limited. Instead, prints, as the most widely distributed medium, and drawings, as the most private, have been the natural vehicles for comic content. Drawn from the National Gallery of Art's collection, Sense of Humor celebrates this incredibly rich though easily overlooked tradition through works including Renaissance caricatures, biting English satires, and20th-century comics. The exhibition includes major works by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Jacques Callot, William Hogarth, James Gillray, Francisco de Goya, and Honoré Daumier, as well as later examples by Alexander Calder, Red Grooms, Saul Steinberg, Art Spiegelman, and the Guerrilla Girls.

James Gillray, Wierd-Sisters; Ministers of Darkness; Minions of the Moon, 1791

Any exhibit on humor that covers 500 years (from 1470 through 1997), two continents and at least five countries is going to have to deal with the vagaries of what humor actually is. Even within my lifetime, what is considered permissible humor in America has changed, sometimes drastically. The exhibit was divided into three galleries – according to their press release (available at the website) the first "focuses on the emergence of humorous images in prints and drawings from the 15th to 17th centuries. Satires and caricatures gained popularity during this era, poking fun at the human condition using archetypal figures from mythology and folklore. While not yet intended as caricatures of individuals, Italian works reflected the Renaissance interest in the human figure and emotion." To modern eyes, drawings of dwarves or grotesques do not really appear to be either humorous or a cartoon, but the curators make the arguments that the foundations of caricature and satirical cartooning are laid in this period. 

William Hogarth, Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn, 1738

The second gallery begins featuring artists that most of us would consider cartoonists as it "continues with works from the 18th and 19th centuries, when certain artists dedicated themselves exclusively to comical subjects." In this room one found a good selection of the British masters Hogarth, Rowlandson, Gillray and Cruikshank, as well as Goya and Daumier (and oddly enough the painter Fragonard who drew an errant lover hiding from parents in an etching, The Armoire). This is the most interesting part of the exhibit for historians of comics, and the strong selection of etchings and drawings is worth studying since one rarely gets to see the contemporary prints, or even the original drawings such as Cruickshank's pencil and ink drawing Taking the Air in Hyde Park (1865). The release also notes, "Included in the exhibition is Daumier's Le Ventre Législatif (The Legislative Belly) (1834), a famous image that mocks the conservative members of France's Chamber of Deputies," but the exhibit does not note that the sculptures Daumier also made of the Deputies is on permanent display in another gallery of the museum -- a lost opportunity.

The final gallery "focuses on the 20th century and encompasses both the gentle fun of works by George Bellows, Alexander Calder, and Mabel Dwight and the biting satire of Hans Haacke and Rupert García. Works by professional cartoonists such as R. Crumb, George Herriman, Winsor McCay, and Art Spiegelman are presented alongside mainstream artists like Calder, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Nutt, and Andy Warhol." Of most interest were the McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland: Climbing the Great North Pole) and Herriman (Ah-h, She Sails Like an Angel, 1921) originals, both of which are worth examining in detail. This section also showed the paucity of the NGA's collections in modern comic art. These are joined by a print by Art Spiegelman, and several Zap Comic books, recently collected and described in standard art historical terms:

Robert Crumb (artist, author), Apex Novelties (publisher)

Zap #1, 1968

28-page paperback bound volume with half-tone and offset lithograph illustrations in black and

cover in full color

sheet: 24.13 x 17.15 cm (9 1/2 x 6 3/4 in.)

open: 24.13 x 34.29 cm (9 1/2 x 13 1/2 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of William and Abigail Gerdts

The fact that the Gallery still can not bring itself to use the word 'comic book,' the standard term as opposed to paperback bound volume, unfortunately shows that it has far to go in dealing with the twentieth century's popular culture rather than fine art. Still, the exhibit is interesting, and well-worth repeated viewings which are almost necessary to understand the material from the first four centuries of the show.

(This review was written for the International Journal of Comic Art 20:2, but this version appears on both the IJOCA and ComicsDC websites on November 16, 2018, while the exhibit is still open for viewing. For those not in DC, Bruce Guthrie has photographs of the entire exhibit at http://www.bguthriephotos.com/graphlib.nsf/keys/2018_07_29B2_NGA_Humor)

Sense of Humor exhibit open at National Gallery of Art

Sense of Humor

July 15, 2018 – January 6, 2019

West Building, Ground Floor

https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2018/sense-of-humor.html

James Gillray, Midas, Transmuting All into Paper, 1797, etching with hand-coloring in watercolor on laid paper, Wright and Evans 1851, no. 168, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Purchased as an Anonymous Gift

Humor may be fundamental to human experience, but its expression in painting and sculpture has been limited. Instead, prints, as the most widely distributed medium, and drawings, as the most private, have been the natural vehicles for comic content. Drawn from the National Gallery of Art's collection, Sense of Humor celebrates this incredibly rich though easily overlooked tradition through works including Renaissance caricatures, biting English satires, and 20th-century comics. The exhibition includes major works by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Jacques Callot, William Hogarth, James Gillray, Francisco Goya, and Honoré Daumier, as well as later examples by Alexander Calder, Red Grooms, Saul Steinberg, Art Spiegelman, and the Guerrilla Girls.

The exhibition is curated by Jonathan Bober, Andrew W. Mellon senior curator of prints and drawings; Judith Brodie, curator and head of the department of American and modern prints and drawings; and Stacey Sell, associate curator, department of old master drawings, all National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Organization: Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington
Passes: Admission is always free and passes are not required

About the Artists

Bruegel the Elder, Pieter

Flemish

, 1525 - 1569

Calder, Alexander

American

, 1898 - 1976

Callot, Jacques

French

, 1592 - 1635

Daumier, Honoré

French

, 1808 - 1879

Gillray, James

British

, 1757 - 1815

Goya, Francisco de

Spanish

, 1746 - 1828

Grooms, Red

American

, 1937 -

Guerrilla Girls

1985 -

Hogarth, William

British

, 1697 - 1764

Spiegelman, Art

American

, 1948 -

Steinberg, Saul

American

, 1914 - 1999

Press Event: Sense of Humor

https://www.nga.gov/audio-video/press/press-sense-of-humor.html

At the press preview for Sense of Humor on Tuesday, July 10, 2018, remarks were given by Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. Following that, a tour of the exhibition was given by Jonathan Bober, Andrew W. Mellon senior curator of prints and drawings; Stacey Sell, associate curator, department of old master drawings; and Judith Brodie, curator and head of the department of American and modern prints and drawings.

Released: July 10, 2018

Barbara Dale's studio and cartoon collection

 Besides being a stunningly successful cartoonist, Barbara Dale also has great collections of comics and cartoon history.  Things like Thomas Nast's business card. She's known everyone, and gotten cartoons from many of them. Barbara opened her house and studio for a ComicsDC tour recently and has agreed to let me show some of her excellent collection.

More pictures are here.

A stack of KAL's art

The Maus in the bathroom

 

Some of Barbara's merchandise

One of three life-size Cathy dolls in existence and a Rube Goldberg original

Oct 21: Art Spiegelman's Wordless at GWU

Art Spiegelman's WORDLESS! with music by Phillip Johnston

Presented by GW Lisner as part of the Washington DCJCC's Hyman S. & Freda Bernstein Jewish Literary Festival

Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - 8:00pm

Tickets: $35, $40, $45

Art Spiegelman and Phillip Johnston unite in WORDLESS! --  a new and stimulating hybrid of slides, talk and musical performance. With original music by Phillip Johnston and live narration and text by Art Spiegelman, this live performance delves into Art's premise around comics, their history, and their capacity for images to go right to the brain as wordless messages. Experience the art of comics as Spiegelman probes further into the nature and possibilities of his medium. 

15% discount for Students/Alumni/Faculty/Staff with GWID and Seniors/Military with ID at the Lisner Box Office.

Bhob Stewart's 1969 underground comics exhibit at the Corcoran

I never met Bhob Stewart who passed away this week. I'm sorry I didn't because our interests in pop culture overlapped. We must have corresponded about comics though, because my name was in his email address book, and his friend Brad Verter was kind enough to send a notice of his death, and some scans that he thought might be of interest. Bhob had apparently asked him to scan these for his blog Potrzebie, but didn't get a chance to use them.


Bhob was apparently instrumental in putting on Phonus Balonus, an underground cartoon exhibit at an offshoot of the Corcoran Gallery on Dupont Circle. Sean Howe has photographs online here, here, and here.

Here are the scans about the exhibit. I'm afraid most of them are only partially complete, but they give you an idea about what was in the show, and how it was received. Brad scanned the whole catalog of the show, and it's online here. Two libraries are shown in Worldcat as holding a copy of it - the Tate in London and UC Berkeley in California.

Corcoran Gallery's press release, page 1

Front cover to the catalog with art by Bhob.

Exhibit opening ticket.

Newspaper clipping with Skip Williamson art

Article from the New York Post.

Fragment of a Washington Post article

Partial Washington Post article from May 21, 1969.

Partial Washington Star article from June 1, 1969

Article from an unknown New York city magazine.

For more information on Bhob's life, read Bhob Stewart, 1937-2014, by Bill Pearson, Feb 26, 2014.

    

     

Mar 26: Art Spiegelman at DCJCC

TICKETS FOR ART SPIEGELMAN ON MARCH 26 ON SALE NOW!  _________________________________________ Authors Out Loud presents Art Spiegelman MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus Monday, March 26 7:30 pm $20; Member/Student with ID/Senior $15 $50 VIP Premium Ticket  Pulitzer Prize-winner Art Spiegelman reenters Maus, the unforgettable biography of his father's life during and after the Holocaust. Spiegelman delves into the book that consumed him for 13 years to discuss his survivor parents, the oxymoron of picturing life in a death camp, racist imagery and his beloved medium of comics. MetaMaus brilliantly deconstructs one of the most important works of art and literature of the 20th century, while providing insight into Spiegelman's creative process. More Information  Purchase Tickets _________________________________________ Authors Out Loud is funded in part by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, an agency supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.  For more information contact Elie Lichtschein at eliel@washingtondcjcc.org or (202) 777-3250.

Comic Riffs checks in with Spiegelman

ART SPIEGELMAN reacts to winning grand prize at Angoulême
By Michael Cavna
Washington Post Comic Riffs blog January 31 2011

Singer on Spiegelman and Maus

Marc Singer writes on teaching Maus for weeks 6-7 of his class on comics at Howard.

Art Spiegelman in today's Post

See "The St. Louis Refugee Ship Blues: Art Spiegelman recounts a sad story 70 years later" for Spiegelman's full-page look at editorial cartoons on the St. Louis, a ship full of Jewish refugees from the Nazis that wasn't allowed to dock in the US. It's an excellent piece of cartoon journalism with a hat-tip to Herblock included. A piece like this shows what newspapers could still be for people.

AcaciaO reports on Spiegelman at Corcoran

See "Art Spiegelman: Comics From Mickey Mouse to Manga," By AcaciaO, We Love DC blog May 6th, 2009 for her report on his Corcoran lecture.

The unanswered question - did he smoke?

Comic Riffs talks to Spiegelman too, and he too likes Cul de Sac

Completing the Trifecta, Comic Riffs has "Mr. Spiegelman Goes to Washington," Michael Cavna, May 4, 2009 and "The Interview: "Maus's" Art Spiegelman" By Michael Cavna, May 5, 2009 in which he says, I like Richard Thompson's work ["Cul de Sac"]. They're good gags, and graphically it's on a very high level. ... It really seems like the inheritor to the "Calvin and Hobbes" [mantle]. It's amazing when any strip can electrify and bring life to a form [the comic strip] that is on life support.

Spiegelman interview online at Express

Here's another interview with Spiegelman - "Graphic Art: Art Spiegelman," by Express contributor Tim Follos, Express May 4, 2009.

Remember he's at the Corcoran tonight.

April 2: Art Spiegelman at George Washington U

Art Spiegleman on April 2 will be at GWU's Jack Morton Auditorium at 7 PM.

I'll be at the Herblock award so I'll have to miss this, but he's always an entertaining speaker.

Thanks to Phil T. for the tip.

May 4: Art Spiegelman at the Corcoran

I've seen him give this talk before and it's good.

May 4, Monday 7 p.m. at the Corcoran

Art Spiegelman: Comix 101

Members $20; Public $25

Art Spiegelman has almost single-handedly brought comic books out of the toy closet and onto the literature shelves. His comics are best known for their shifting graphic style, their formal complexity, and controversial content. In 1992, his masterful Holocaust narrative Maus won the Pulitzer Prize, and Maus II continued the remarkable story of his parents' survival of the Nazi regime. The New York Times Book
Review listed Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers among the most Notable Books of 2004. On this evening, Spiegelman takes the audience on a chronological tour of the evolution of comics all the while explaining the value of this medium and why it should not be ignored.

The Argentina Copello Dudley Memorial Lecture, established in 1984, supported by the Dudley Endowment Fund, presents distinguished speakers who have contributed significantly to our understanding of the arts.

Spiegelman, Chabon, to read at George Washington University

Sara Duke tips us off that, for a course on Jewish literature, Spiegelman and Chabon will be at GWU this spring. "While on campus, several authors will give readings open to the entire GW community. Ulinich will read on March 5; Chabon, who will be introduced by GW's Wang Visiting Professor in Contemporary English Edward P. Jones, will present on March 23; and Spiegelman will read on April 2."

GWU's PR deptartment says, "The event is open and free to the public. It will be held at 8pm in the Jack Morton Auditorium, which is located on the main level of the Media and Public Affairs Building. The address is 805 21st St. NW."

OT: On Spiegelman's Maus and ... hmmm .... what works there...?

My friend Rusty Witek, who's written a book or two about Art Spiegelman sent me an email yesterday with the subject line "If you ever"

. . .find yourself writing anything—anything at all—on Art Spiegelman’s best-known work, do NOT title it “Of Mice and [Something].” Please.

So, just to be sure, I asked him if he meant something like this:

OF 'MAUS' AND MAN: Two decades after his Holocaust memoir gained him a Pulitzer Prize and comics cultural acceptance, Art Spiegelman still struggles and strives to break the medium wide open, By Kiel Phegley, 2/3/2009.

To which he responded:

Very much so. And like this:

Of Maus and More

Of Mice and Memory

Of Maus and Memory

Of Mice and Vermin

Of Mice and Mimesis

Of Maus and Men

Of Mice and Menschen (this one also worked in “Comics Come of Age” in the title.)

Of Men and Mice

Of Mice and Supermen

Of Mice and Jews

These are almost all from peer-reviewed journals—don’t even think about the reviews and feature articles.

So yeah, like that.

That makes “The Maus That Roared” seem charmingly inventive. And after a certain point it means one of two disturbing things: either they aren’t reading the critical literature on Maus before submitting their own stuff, or they know it and use the title anyway. And either way an editor lets them do it.

You've been warned.

Spiegelman's Breakdowns on sale at Politics and Prose

Minor bit from today's newletter - BREAKDOWNS: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! by Art Spiegelman, $27.50 now $18.43 - but they might still have signed copies from when he was there.

Politics & Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse
5015 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20008
(202) 364-1919 or (800) 722-0790
Fax: (202) 966-7532

www.moderntimescoffeehouse.com
www.politics-prose.com
e-mail: books@politics-prose.com

Store Hours:

Monday-Saturday: 9 a.m.-10 p.m
Sunday: 10 a.m.-8 p.m.

Art Spiegelman at Politics and Prose

Spiegelman gave his usual entertaining performance at a booksigning for Breakdowns last week. The crowd was standing room only, but I was near the front due to Rick B's vigilant saving of a seat. After noting that he didn't have to worry about the government trying to kill him or any of his usual fears, Spiegelman ran through a powerpoint that covered the high points of the Breakdowns book, touched on his children's book for his wife's imprint and then took questions. You can buy a recording of the talk from Politics and Prose.

Bruce Guthrie took his usual load of shots, but here's three that I got:

Art Spiegelman! (updated!)

'Toonsmith Art Spiegelman Gets Graphic About His Life, Career and the Processes of a Comics Universe
By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 6, 2008; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/05/AR2008110504443.html

Secret Identity: Art Spiegelman's Life Work
Written by Scott A. Rosenberg for Express
Posted By Express at 12:08 AM on November 6, 2008
http://www.expressnightout.com/content/2008/11/secret_identity_art_spiegelman_and_his_l.php


Athitakis wrote in to point out:

another interview -
Art Spiegelman Is Not Arrogant
Posted by Mark Athitakis
Washington City Paper City Desk blog Nov. 6, 2008, at 10:56 am
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2008/11/06/art-spiegelman-is-not-arrogant/

and a review of Breakdowns -

Art Spiegelman
Friday, Nov. 7, at Politics and Prose
By Mark Athitakis
Washington City Paper November 6, 2008
http://washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=36439