David Wojnarowicz; Comics & Medicine; Connie Sun; Hartley Lin; Ellen Lindner; Brutalist Web Design
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David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night
July 13-September 30, 2018, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC.
Today, David Wojnarowicz is known mostly as a martyr to the culture wars of the 1980s, another artist diagnosed with AIDS who fought along with so many to get the government to act, for a long time in vain, and who then, like so many others, died of the disease, a terrible tear in the fabric of art that was savagely exacted on gay men of that generation. Wojnarowicz came out of the same deeply downtown bohemianism of the early 1980s that fueled Jean-Michel Basquiat’s equally short, culture-altering arc through the art world: small cadres of like-minded underground characters and self-defined artists, desperate to act on the culture but denied the usual access to artistic power structures for reasons financial, psychological, racial, sexual. Wojnarowicz rose amid a gritty East Village aesthetic of graffiti, Expressionistic gestures, roughly assembled surfaces, funky found objects, one-night shows at clubs, and midnight guerrilla actions on the finer art. But in a way, Wojnarowicz’s tremendous, almost Rimbaud-like reputation suits, since he was an even better, more lucid freedom fighter than he was an artist.
True, Wojnarowicz’s formal means — stenciling, spray painting, collaging — are anti-academic. But his fact-and-fantasy images of existential violence and degradation, past and present, are in an old allegorical mode. With its allover collage of rifle targets, national flags and United States currency, the 1986 painting that gives the show its title could easily be re-dated to 2018. So could the quartet of 1987 paintings named for the four elements: Earth, Water, Wind and Fire. Each depicts an ecological Armageddon, though there are other things going on too.
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Comics and Medicine Conference: The Ways We Work
August 16-18, 2018, White River Junction, VT.
Featuring Keynote Speakers: David Macaulay, Susan Merrill Squier, and Whit Taylor
Graphic Medicine explores the interaction between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare. We are a community of academics, health carers, authors, artists, and fans of comics and medicine. For more information about Graphic Medicine, and to see recent conference programming, visit: graphicmedicine.org
Last year’s Seattle-based conference focused on “accessibility” as an aspect linking comics and health; two areas where improvements in reaching diverse audiences and creating platforms for marginalized voices are continuous and important topics of discussion.
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Meals You Can Eat on the New York City Subway
Connie Sun in the NY-er.
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Mantle, Baby
Ellen Lindner Baseball Comics
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Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design
Via David Copeland.
A website is not a book or a magazine. Because it’s viewed in a browser, users can scroll the browser’s viewport to read content that can’t fit on one screen. This mechanism works beautifully and allows visitors to read content uninterrupted by clicking and page-reloading.
While long-form content may require navigation and multiple pages, there’s rarely need to artificially paginate articles, blog posts, or other medium-length content simply to satisfy advertisers or inflate engagement numbers.
Scrolling also allows the visitor to consume content at their pace using a method they prefer. Like the back button, this can only be broken by intentional design and careless implementation.
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Joanie and Jordie – 7-17-18 – by Kurt Ankeny