It's Official. In The Spring I Will Be Curating An Exhibition Of Young, American Indie Comic Artists

It's official. In the spring I will be curating an exhibition of young, American indie comic artists at the Amakusa Cultural Center (天草市立文化交流館). So far over a dozen artists have confirmed, and I couldn't be more excited to show their beautiful work.

Expect more updates and images in the coming weeks! 

The latest post from my other project. It's interesting for me to see where my brother and I differ and converge when it comes to identity.

I'm always looking for submissions, so check out the how-to here! 

American Mangaka will be up at the Amakusa Cultural Exchange Center from June 1-8, with an opening on June 1st from 12-5pm. 

The ten artists exhibiting are: Ryan Andrews, Kevin Czapiewski, Adrien Dacquel, Sean Dove, Matt Forsythe, Joseph Lambert, Jen Lee, Sloane Leong, Kris Mukai, and Jon Wolfe.

Since leaving Marwen, I've really missed the graphic design work I was able to do there as the in-house designer. Finally I've found an outlet for that kind of work at my junior high. Every so often the homeroom teachers here create a "newspaper" for their class, which is generally a text-crammed document designed in Microsoft word and printed out on B4 paper.

I decided to try my hand at it and made this English language paper for the 8th grade students. I had fun mixing in fun, cultural things (a recipe, music recommendations, etc.) and new grammar and words (expressions, baking vocab, etc.).  If you're a teacher in Japan reading this and want to print out a copy for your students, you can grab the PDF here.

Shinro Ohtake, Appropriate Proportions, 2002. Glass stairway made of melted camera lenses. Go'o Shrine, Naoshima, Japan. Taken by Valeria Reyes, 2013.

To check out my article on Naoshima, the contemporary art island, click here.

Little Victories is up as of January 9th! It will be on display at Kawaura Junior High (Kawachū) until February 11th. The work is by Nathan Vernau, who's been one of my favorite artists since I first encountered his work at the Next fair in Chicago in spring of 2011. I'm more than excited to be showing his pieces at my middle school! 

The students in my school have very little real life exposure to contemporary art, so I wanted to really humanize and explain the show to them. Thus, I included a picture of the artist and his studio, as well as a description of the process and themes of his work. Nathan's pieces encourage the viewer to come up with their own interpretation of the works' meaning as it might relate to their lives. I knew this could be difficult for students with little practice viewing conceptual art, so I created a viewing guide and posted my personal interpretation of one of the works to help them out. I worked to write everything in both 9th grade level English and Japanese.

So far the students I've spoken with are enjoying the work. An 8th grader who loves to draw called them beautiful. My next goal is to reach out to the local high schools to see if some of their students would be interested in seeing the pieces.   You can find more of Nathan's work here and read an interview I did with him last year here.