Loving a new exhibition of women’s comic art recently opened at Yeshiva University Museum, in New York City: Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women.
Really edgy art, and very entertaining too.
Below is an extract from my write-up, just published in The Jewish Week:
YU Museum’s ‘Graphic Details’ exhibit spotlights feminist and edgy Jewish comics.
“Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women,” which opened last week, presents work by 18 artists from the U.S., Canada, England and Israel from the 1970s to the present.
The show, co-curated by London-based artist and academic Sarah Lightman and New York-based writer and comic-art collector Michael Kaminer, presents work combining the unapologetically intimate and traumatic, the hilarious and the profound.
What’s striking about “Graphic Details” is that women characters are always center stage in the comic art presented — countering traditional comic art by male artists in which women were (and still are) presented as sexual objects.
Women are the ones who objectify themselves in “Graphic Details,” telling their own tales of relationships, family, sex, body issues, pregnancy, as well as their relationship with Judaism, Israel and community, using their own comic alter-egos.
There is a particularly politicized statement in work shown by underground comic art pioneers from the 1970s and 1980s, such as Trina Robbins, Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Diane Noomin, who created the Wimmin’s Comix and Twisted Sisters anthologies.
“The 1970s work took place in a more politicized context; these women were reacting to horrible sexism in the underground comics world,” explains Michael Kaminer about his and Lightman’s curatorial choices. “By exposing themselves the way they did, those artists made an enormous impact on comics and the culture at large. Much of the work of today is no less bold or gripping, but takes place in an environment somewhat less charged with gender politics.”
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