ART SPIEGELMAN: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG %@&*!
THIS exhibition zooms in on a few excerpts from the now iconic book juxtaposed with film, drawings and mementos that highlight Art Spiegelman’s personal history and some of his key influences; it also sheds light on the forces that helped him revolutionize his art form. Art Spiegelman: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and curated by Luis Croquer, Director and Chief Curator.
PAST EXHIBITIONS
ART SPIEGELMAN:
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG %@&*!
MAY 29 – JULY 26, 2009
“It’s a manifesto, a diary, a crumpled suicide note and a still-relevant love letter to the medium I adore.”
— Art Spiegelman
In 1978, an alienated and ignored underground cartoonist named Art Spiegelman published Breakdowns. By producing this publication, Spiegelman, a respected but misunderstood fixture of the underground comix scene was attempting to break a long-standing social and cultural taboo by calling himself an artist and his medium an art form.
Breakdowns was instrumental in making comics culturally respectable, helping them to infiltrate mainstream libraries and universities. In Breakdowns Spiegelman explored and expanded comics, their boundaries and limitations, transforming a medium that was generally regarded as cheerful and banal into a site of artistic exploration, biographical testimony and a territory to exorcize personal demons.
The exhibition zooms in on a few excerpts from the now iconic book juxtaposed with film, drawings and mementos that highlight Art Spiegelman’s personal history and some of his key influences; it also sheds light on the forces that helped him revolutionize his art form.
Spiegelman’s interest in art, experimental films, and popular and underground culture (among other high and low sources) became his inspiration and tools to look incisively at and question the “stuff” of his own medium. This exhibition presents some of the unique, rich and multilayered sources that served as his springboard to embarking on a quest to forever rupture the illusion of time that the drawn boxes had imposed on the printed page until then.
Art Spiegelman: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and curated by Luis Croquer, Director and Chief Curator.
