Category: Art & Entertainment

Look — up in the sky — it’s a bird, it’s a plane! No — it’s the Boca Raton Museum of Art’s new headliner, Beyond the Cape! Comics and Contemporary Art.

The exhibition offers a new look at the relationship between contemporary artists and graphic novels and comic books.

Many of today’s most high-profile artists have been influenced by this genre and the exhibit takes a deeper look at how graphic novels and comics address societal issues of race, class, gender and politics.

“It’s exciting to see younger audiences express strong interest in this exhibition,” Kathleen Goncharov, the museum’s senior curator, said.

Goncharov — aided by Calvin Reid, senior news editor at Publishers Weekly and a comic book expert — has selected an eclectic, playful, and sometimes wickedly burlesque collection of video, photographs, sculpture, prints, and drawings in addition to rare comics and contemporary and historic animation for display.

The installation features more than 80 works by 40 artists, including Christian Marclay, Kerry James Marshall, Elizabeth Murray, Joyce Pensato, Raymond Pettibon, Peter Saul, Kenny Scharf and Michael Zansky among others. Works by Takashi Murakami and Yositomo Nara, who specialize in Japanese comics, or manga, are also highlighted.

“There is a long history here, in Europe and in Japan, between comics and fine art,” Zansky, whose work is prominently displayed, said. “Comics have a large influence in the culture and on contemporary artists.  This exhibit showcases artists who are attracted to (the) quirky visuals and subversive content of adult comics.”

Zansky comes to the world of comics naturally. His father was Louis Zansky, who drew for the circa 1940s Classic Comics series of graphic adaptations of famous literary works. Michael Zansky’s Walking Figure, a 16-foot-high carved, burnt, and painted plywood panel of a giant foot on an octagonal foundation, is based on the Colossus of Constantine, a gargantuan marble statue of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great.

The work is displayed at the entry to the exhibit, next to and juxtaposed with Manuscript, a giant hennaed hand by Indian American artist Chitra Ganesh.

The show looks beyond the 1960s Pop Art movement, led by New York-centric artists such as Andy Warhol and Ray Lichtenstein, and features the “other” art movements from the ‘60s and ‘70s such as the Hairy Who and Bay Area Funk Art. Hairy Who artists Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, and Karl Wirsum, along with works by underground comic book artists such as R. Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Mimi Pond are also featured.

A highlight of the show is Chicago artist Kerry James Marshall’s comic series Rhythm Mastr, which documents violence in his hometown. Known for his flat, colorful paintings of contemporary black America, Marshall’s work is in high demand.

Although comics and graphic novels are part of a genre dominated by men, a number of women are highlighted in the show. New York artist Jody Culkin, in particular, raises the feminist bona fides of the exhibit with A Prophetic Drama. The 9-minute animated comic is based loosely on a play about mummies coming to life in the British Museum, written in 1875 by Harriet Hosmer, a celebrated 19^th-century sculptor who also enjoyed dabbling in science fiction writing.

Also featured are Chitra Ganesh, figurative artist Elizabeth Murray and Jamaican feminist artist Renee Cox, known for upending sexist and racist stereotypes with her art. Beyond the Cape! runs through Oct. 6.

Back in the 1960s, vocalist Lou Christie sang a pop tune called Two Faces Have I. In the ‘90s, two famed puppet/mask designers took that concept to create masks for the live stage version of Disney’s The Lion King.

The idea not only worked, it roared.

Since The Lion King debuted on Broadway in 1997, more than 90 million people worldwide have experienced its visual artistry and reveled in its award-winning score.

Based on the eponymous animated Disney film, the stage adaptation features music by Elton John and lyrics by Tim Rice. Six indigenous African languages are spoken throughout the show and extraordinary costumes often exceed the expectations of show planners and audiences.

The Lion King has just passed through South Florida. In mid-spring, the Serengeti was recreated behind the footlights at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach. The production, with its array of performers and elegant scenery, completed its run at the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami on May 26.

The show that packed those two venues combined the talents of Disney Theatrical Productions with the redoubtable capabilities of Julie Taymor, the show’s director, costume designer, and —with Michael Curry — mask co-designer.

Taymor is the first woman to win a Tony Award for Direction of a Musical. Curry is owner and operator of Michael Curry Design, which creates live performance-oriented devices for Cirque du Soleil, Super Bowl shows, the Olympics, and was the creative force behind New York City’s millennium event in 2000.

With a nod to Christie’s song title, the masks for most lead characters are attached to the top of the actors’ heads, meaning their faces as well as their animal avatars can be identified. The masks drop to cover faces when characters reveal their more animalistic sides.

Background performers are fitted with more stylized devices or puppet-style gear, including bicycle-like equipment for herds of running gazelles; stilts and neck extensions for giraffes, and a vast amount of rigging and structuring for elephants. The stampede, critical to the plot, is artfully crafted in a manner that defies explanation. But it appears so real and works so well in the show.

Taymor said once she discovered she needed to show both the human and animal traits of The Lion King characters, she labored to convince Disney of her concept. That involved creating three versions of the character Scar, three Zazus, and two Timons, and presenting all to Disney’s then-CEO, Michael Eisner. He gave the thumbs-up.

The musical is a sweet love story between a father and son — Mufasa, the lion king at the opening and his son and successor, Simba. Later comes the sweetheart tale of the mature Simba getting to know his betrothed, Nala.

Taymor explained the imagery of the masks. “Obviously, Mufasa is the sun. That’s why you have the circle [the song, Circle of Life]. He’s very much about symmetry and radiation, the sun god. Simba and Nala are in that world of Mufasa.” Of her experience with The Lion King, Taymor said: “It’s the most fun thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

There must be at least two considerations to label something as art. The first is … there must be the recognition that something was made for an audience of some kind to receive, discuss or enjoy. … The second point is simply the recognition of skill.”

Brannon McConkey

At Stacey Mandell’s first solo exhibition, Letters to Our Younger Self, at the Miami Dade College Hialeah Campus Art Gallery, there could be no doubt in a viewer’s mind the artist was sharing, successfully, the way she experiences the world and that her work was an extension of her personality. Her unique art form encompasses words, emotions, culture, but also activities of daily life and current events.

Mandell uses shorthand words and phrases — whether actual Gregg shorthand, cursive writing, even Braille — as an abstract gestural form, in which the form’s meaning provides an abstract narrative on the canvas.

“I believe we have much more in common than we may think — love and gratitude, diversity and inclusion, identity and culture, encourage and nurture. Saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’” Mandell said. “These are expressions of the soul. We all share the same hopes, dreams, and fears. We all have good days and bad days.

“My artwork is the physical manifestation of the expressions of my soul,” she said. “My messages are the conversations contained in the artwork.” xhibition curators Noor Blazekovic and Alejandro Mendoza, in a joint statement, said they were fascinated how Mandell frames an idea and communicates it to an audience. “What sets her creative work apart from other human expression is that she is creating in the world of non-verbal communication — she uses different tools: shorthand, words, visual images, movement, ideas, and more — to create feelings, thoughts, images, and ideas in the audience to communicate her particular message that as creator she wants to share. The intent is to inform, move, and open the audience’s mind and perspective to seeing the world in a different light than before.”

One work that shows that “different light” is This is not a blank Steno pad, a 5-foot-high acrylic-on-canvas image of the familiar off-green paper notebook. We may know it’s called a steno pad, and many of us of a certain age understand these notepads, with the spiral at the top for easy page-flipping, were popularized in their use by actual stenographers — secretaries, court reporters, close-caption writers in yesteryear’s TV industry, and the like.

Mandell has more than a passing familiarity with proper penmanship. A devotee of punctilious handwriting since her mother taught her cursive in grade school in rural central Illinois, Mandell made her way in the world — in quite the circuitous way, as it turned out — depending on Gregg Shorthand. After graduating from college prepared to teach music and math, Mandell instead took a clerical job where she had to learn shorthand.

“Learning Gregg Shorthand was a turning point on my career path,” Mandell said. From there, she became a legal secretary and, later, jumped to law school, employing her shorthand skills at every point.

“Throughout my 20-year legal career, I utilized shorthand to take notes and draft documents,” Mandell said. During that span, she said, she became fixated on using shorthand to communicate different ideas in a very different way — to express herself as an artist.

Once she left lawyering behind and relocated to South Florida when her husband retired, Mandell decided to pursue that idea.

This is not a blank steno pad was her first work in her steno pad series. It’s as much a statement about her present as it is about her view of our present culture: Much like the absence of ink and scrawl on Mandell’s canvas, the very jobs it represents — or, at least, the job titles — are now part of the past.

Mandell’s steno pad is blank, she said, “because of technology; no one uses it for its intended purpose anymore. It represents the dying art of a beautiful, phonetic language.” Mandell said after she painted the pad of paper, she’d planned to add to it a number of life lessons — in shorthand, of course. “But every time I thought about writing on it, I stopped. I could not bring myself to write on this one,” she said. “I finally realized this one meant more than anything I could express with shorthand.”