The Underground Is Always Outside
September 15 – 18
Curators: Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Dan Nadel
Artists: Robert Armstrong, Michele Brand, Robert Crumb, Kim Deitch, Phoebe Gloeckner, Justin Green, Rick Griffin, Bill Griffith, Rory Hayes, Jay Kinney, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Jay Lynch, Michael McMillan, Willy Mendes, Willy Murphy, Diane Noomin, Trina Robbins, Spain Rodriguez, Sharon Rudahl, Gilbert Shelton, Art Spiegelman, Carol Tyler, Robert Williams, S. Clay Wilson and Julie Wood.
Underground comics remain one of the most misunderstood art forms. Born of the liberatory impulse of the 1960s American counterculture and honed in the 1970s and ‘80s, it has offered innumerable artists an outlet for trenchant cultural commentary, absurdist humor, psychedelic flowerings, confessional autobiography, and all-out fantasy. Nevertheless, the tremendous visual, narrative, and emotional diversity of underground comics has rarely been examined as a form of drawing. This exhibition, organized by pioneering underground cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb and curator Dan Nadel offers an overview of the many ways artists used the form to create compelling images and stories.
The exhibition focuses on original comic art by canonical figures such as Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Bill Griffith, Art Spiegelman, Spain Rodriguez, Robert Williams and S. Clay Wilson, alongside their equally fascinating, if lesser-known peers, among them the great female cartoonists of the time, who brought scathing personal politics and memoirs to the field – Phoebe Gloeckner, Diane Noomin, Willy Mendes, Sharon Rudahl, and artists who arrived into comics with perspectives that were immersed in surreal or avant garde impulses, including Rory Hayes, Michael McMillan, and Jewelie Goodvibes. Ultimately, the American underground was a place where outsiders could flourish. It was about as far out as one could get, forever teetering on the edge of art and acceptability.
Installation photos are below, and here’s a recording of my September 17, 2022 public conversation with Phoebe Gloeckner and Gilbert Shelton.
