“Understanding, Writing and Making Comics,” an exhibition of collaborative works by Southeast Missouri State University literature, English and art students, opens April 5 at The Nest Gallery at Southeast’s River Campus.
The exhibition is on display through May 6, with a closing reception that day from 5-7 p.m.
The students across two disciplines and three courses worked collaboratively to produce the artifacts in this exhibition:
- Intermediate Creative Writing, taught by Dr. James Brubaker, associate professor of English
- Comics and Graphic Novels, taught by Dr. Sandra Cox, associate professor of English
- Special Topics in Art & Design: Making Comics, taught by Hannah Sanders, associate professor and area head of printmaking
Two of this integrated courses’ goals — building important visual and textual communications skills and broadening perspectives about art, design, and literature — required students and faculty to consider how comics, as a medium, function to inform, persuade and delight.
The works exhibited are drawn from a variety of exercises and projects, including Lynda Barry-inspired daily self-portraits on notecards, Drawing Jam exercises where students collaborate on pages of fascinating humans and creatures, and daily dairy entries that became the raw material for additional digital works and works on paper.
Additionally, Brubaker, Cox and Sanders collaboratively designed three major projects for the course, examples from two of which are exhibited. Students placed all materials in a shared digital library and curated their own selections into hand bound pamphlet stitch books with unique marbled paper covers. The arrangement and juxtaposition of the drawings and words in each piece seeks to show how combination and sequencing can produce manifold meanings using the same content, as a way of exploring ideas about time and space in comics as a creative medium.
The Nest Gallery is located on the first floor of the Seminary Building and is an intimate exhibition space reserved for students interested in group exhibitions. Hours of operation are 1-4 p.m. Monday through Friday. All gallery exhibitions, events, and talks are free and open to the public.