by Bruce Guthrie
Smithsonian American Art Museum's archives section has a new exhibit (described below). I volunteer there covering family day events (the Ella Fitzgerald tribute on Saturday with the Dan Dunn speed-painting event was great!) so I check out everything.
The archives section usually talks about people I've never heard of before but it always includes some interesting spots. The most interesting part of this exhibit was Ray Yoshida (1930-2009) who meticulously cut out a lot of panels from cartoons for reference work. One of the open scrapbooks, for example, was a collection of how couples kissing were illustrated in comic strips. But the Sucrets tins filled with tiny cut out tiny images and word balloons was interesting too. Some of them were laid out in the exhibit cases in an easier to see fashion and they even reproduced some of them on the wall. I'm sure folks here will recognize many of them (shown below).
Finding: Source Material in the Archives of American Art
April 22, 2016 – August 21, 2016
In this exhibition, the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art reveals how artists find inspiration. The Archives' collections hold a kaleidoscopic array of source materials; many of these materials are somewhat ordinary: comic- strip panels, newspaper clippings, and snapshots of mundane scenes. Yet the ways in which artists draw on them provides a glimpse into the twists and turns of their creative practices.
There were two source cartoons that Ray Lichtenstein sent to someone too (below). My pics are up on
http://www.bguthriephotos.com/graphlib.nsf/keys/2016_04_25E_SIPG_Source
The exhibit wasn't getting the attention that the Prince In Memoriam photo was getting.
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