Here is the audio recording of a gallery talk I presented at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in June 2013 as part of their Sundays with the Modern program. The title of my talk was “Relief: The Recession of Modernity & Projection of Postmodernity,” and it explored the ways modern and postmodern artists use aspects of relief – off a flat surface or scraping away into a surface – as a way to respond to Clement Greenberg’s formalist notions of “flatness” as painting purity.
As I get the new site up and running, I wanted to use the opportunity to finally post and link to some previous work of mine. One of the most important – and the one I am most proud of to date – is an exhibition on the comics process called Heroes in the Making I was invited to curate for the Greater Denton Arts Council (GDAC) at their Patterson-Appleton Arts Center during the Fall of 2016. The exhibition was a labor of love, and focused on the broad historical process of creating comics, including writing, penciling, inking, lettering, coloring, and editing. I’m also proud of the CMYK color scheme we devised, as shown in the panoramic photo above; the show would not have come together without the brilliant work of the GDAC staff, including Associate Director John Riegelman, Caroline Holley, Danielle Naylor, Joanna Lugo, and, at the time, the Executive Director of the GDAC, Tracy Bays-Boothe.
As part of the programming for the exhibition, we organized on my birthday a panel discussion featuring a stellar panel of speakers: comic writer, prose writer, and essayist David Hopkins’ blog, scholar and teacher Shaun Treat’s blog, and More Fun Comics and Games store owner Tim Stoltzfus.
I recorded the audio embedded below, so apologies are all mine for the poor quality of it. You will also hear during the recording Tracy Bays-Boothe who, at the time, was the Executive Director of the GDAC and now serves as the Associate Director of the Museum of Crafts and Design in San Francisco.
