Tag: art books

An artist of the everyday

The small but fascinating Richard McGuire exhibit at downtown New York City’s Alden Projects has been extended through November 18th. If you aren’t really familiar with the street art that the New Jersey-born visionary multidisciplinary artist and comics creator produced during the late 1970s and early 1980s—newsprint graphic work he’d wheatpasted all over the Lower East Side, wildly dynamic show fliers, and more—a trip to Orchard Street during the course of this month will do you some good. (A bigger show in Connecticut features sculptures, too.)

At NYC arts and politics paper The Brooklyn Rail, Megan N. Liberty writes about the exhibitions and the new monograph that accompanies the Alden Projects show, declaring McGuire “an artist of the everyday.” Here’s Liberty:

The diversity of Richard McGuire’s work is surprising; from his illustrations for The New Yorker and McSweeney’s and published graphic novels Here (2014) and Sequential Drawings (2016) that treat the book as a sculptural object—something I’ve argued in a previous review of Here—to his musical and performance career as a founding member of the post-punk band Liquid Liquid, McGuire’s artistic output is multidisciplinary. Richard McGuire: Art For The Street 1978 – 1982, published to accompany the show of the same title at Alden Projects, NY, adds a new layer to this impressive body of work, detailing his early years enmeshed in the performance and street art scene exhibiting work in museums and galleries alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Harring, with whom he became friends, and on the street alongside Jenny Holzer’s Truisms and SAMO© poetry. 

Read the whole piece at The Brooklyn Rail. Back in 2014, I wrote about McGuire’s graphic novel Here at my site.

Light and liveliness in Jon McNaught’s comics

jon mcnaught comics illustrations

On top of the stuff from UK comics creator, printmaker, and illustrator Jon McNaught that I’ve been meaning to get to since we closed the curtain on 2014 is a folded-over copy of the Fall/Winter issue of Smoke Signal, a newspaper comics anthology published quarterly by Brooklyn’s Desert Island comics shop.

Inside Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Studio

Curated and edited by writer and comics historian Mark Evanier, The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio is a massive coffee table comics treasury, a volume that celebrates lavishly the process of comics production, and over more than 350 pages spans lesser-known (and sometimes unpublished) work of industry pioneers Joe Simon and Jack Kirby as well as their studio personnel.