Local Action

Quick and proud shout-out for some of our former artists-in-residence who have graced the museum’s North Court.  If you can’t get enough of them in their chosen medium, you can find them on Google’s new comics themes:

Hellen Jo

Lark Pien

Gene Luen Yang

If it turns out I’m missing anyone, please inform me post-haste.

While Google certainly doesn’t need the cash and clicks, I think it’s a great move to get some talent to the rest of the world.  Most of my favorite artists I discovered through word-of-mouth, but if someone out there gets into one of our great local’s works through Google, so be it.

I don’t mean to sound as if they’re all local kids done good (see Yang’s work in the N.Y. Times, for example), but it just makes me happy to see the work getting out.  Yay hooray!

The British Punch

Punch, or the London Charivari, was a popular British magazine of humour and satire (1841-2002) that gained an international reputation for two things: 1) writing with wit and irrevance, and 2) using cartoons and comics to take on world politics and society during the 19th and 20th centuries.

The magazine had served as a model for Shanghai’s most popular, and historically most important, illustrated newspaper in the late 1800s, the Dianshizhai Pictorial (1884-1898), and Punch’s renowned cartoons also influenced the development of Chinese cartooning that experienced a “golden age” in 1930s Shanghai.

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