Telling Tales: Contemporary Women Cartoonists

Adam Baumgold Gallery presents Telling Tales: Contemporary Women Cartoonists from September 5th through October 14th. Telling Tales is a subjective look at the last four decades of comics drawn by women.

Geneviève Castrée
Roz Chast
Jessica Ciocci
Julie Doucet
Debbie Drechsler
Anke Feuchtenberger
Renée French
Phoebe Gloeckner
Megan Kelso
Aline Kominsky Crumb
Amy Lockhart
Diane Noomin
Jenni Rope
Dori Seda
Anna Sommer
Carol Tyler
Lauren R. Weinstein

Long a boys club, comics have, since the rise of the late 1960s underground, opened up to women as a medium like any other. Unfortunately, most current historical surveys are notable not only for the absence of women artists but also the absence of women as protagonists or even subjects in the medium itself. And while a gender-based exhibition might marginalize women even further, Telling Tales seems necessary as a slight corrective to the usual historical narrative.

The seventeen artists included here were chosen for their unique points of view and their idiosyncratic approaches to cartooning. All are free from the usual stylizations of comics, making stories that rely as much on line and mark as narrative and dialogue. Each artist has made an indelible mark on the medium, including Aline Kominsky Crumb, who helped revolutionize comics drawing with her scratchy line and brutal abstractions; Debbie Dreschler brings an unthinkably dense patterning to the medium; while Renee French’s lush pencils convey meaning in each stroke. Younger artists, such as Lauren Weinstein and Amy Lockhart, have appropriated old genres, such as confessional and superhero comics, and used them for their own purposes. The larger story of these artists is swiftly evolving and Telling Tales will be just the first chapter of this long artistic narrative.