Pettibon further declares, “As an art form, comics do not need museum validation…” and characterizes comic books as separate but equal from fine art (p. For example, in the Masters of American Comics catalog, Raymond Pettibon (2005) states: “For fans of comics the Museum of Arts is as foreboding and scary a place as the Comics Convention is for lovers of art” (p. In discussions of comics art in the museum setting there is a recurring perception of two worlds colliding, worlds irreconcilably different in aesthetics and socio-economic cultures. However, when comics art is taken from the book and put on a wall, there persists a perception of conflict between two opposed cultural worlds. In short, the conception of comics as a culturally legitimate form of expression has become more widespread in America, catching up to the longer held French and Japanese views of comics as an art form capable of portraying many different kinds of content. Comics scholarship is emerging as a field of study as evidenced by the annual International Comic Arts Forum, currently in its thirteenth year, and peer reviewed journals like the International Journal of Comic Art and ImageTexT. The number of academic art institutions that offer courses in the arts of comics creation and scholarship is similarly increasing: e.g., the School of Visual Arts, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and the Savannah College of Art and Design all have Bachelors of Fine Arts programs in comics, with the latter also offering a Masters degree. The presence of comics in bookstores and libraries has grown exponentially in the US in recent years, mainly in the form of manga and graphic novels, and the number and frequency of film adaptations of comics has followed suit. Rather, a collaborative alteration of both respective contexts to better serve the future of museums and comics should be the ultimate goal. New media curatorial theory, in concert with the emergent work of gallery comics creators, helps to indicate that the museum need not completely change the context of the comics, nor must the comics completely change the context of the museum. Adding these analyses to examples from my own curatorial work in partnership with John Jennings on the exhibitions Other Heroes: African American Comics Creators, Characters, and Archetypes at Jackson State University I suggest new media curation as a useful theoretical framework in comics art exhibition curation. Looking at other instances of comics in art museums, such as Comic Release! from Carnegie Mellon University, I will point to inroads into more theoretically productive comics curatorial philosophies. Via a critique of the 2003 Contemporary Art Museum Houston exhibition Splat Boom Pow! and the 2005 UCLA Hammer Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition Masters of American Comics I seek to highlight curatorial philosophies that avoid confronting the conceptual challenge of bringing the medium to the museum by attempting to fit comics, to one extent or another, into traditional fine art frameworks. However, the context of aesthetic display in museum and gallery settings is far different from the printed book arts format most comics art is created for, and the resulting clash of intentions can lead to a discomfiture between the medium of the work and the space of display. Remasters of American Comics: Sequential art as new media in the transformative museum contextĪlong with the recent wave of recognition and respectability for graphic novels in American culture, comics art has been displayed in museums with increasing frequency.
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