Past Exhibitions

Since the web is constantly updating, many of the references to exhibits I’ve worked on in the past have changed or disappeared. Below are images and brief notes about the Underground Comix app and exhibits I’ve worked on at SFSU, Intersection for the Arts, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA).

San Francisco State University Library Special Collections, Labor Archives and Research Center: Dual Views: Labor Landmarks of San Francisco (2015). Wendy Crittenden and Tom Griscom visited a list of landmarks featured in LARC’s Labor Landmarks Guide Book and photographed each in their contrasting styles. Included was a display of tools, posters, and ephemera related to these locations. Essay: “The Fight for San Francisco” on Places Journal. Kim self-published a catalog for this show (Blurb platform), featuring over 50 photos by Crittenden and Griscom, archival photos, and a detailed historical interview with the Labor Archive’s director Catherine Powell.

Comic Art Productions and Exhibits (CAPE): Underground Classics App for iPhone & iPad (2010). CAPE was a partnership between Kim, Denis Kitchen, and James Danky formed to promote their exhibit Underground Classics, find other venues to host the show and develop new exhibits utilizing art from the estates of Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, and Al Capp. While we were ahead of the curve in terms of museum’s interest in comics material, Kim did build a digital exhibit on the Toura platform. There was some controversy, as Apple censored some of the naughty bits. Michael Dooley covered this issue for Print Magazine: “Sex! Nudity! Comix! iPhone App... Censored!” Michael Dooley. Print (on-line) 8/3/11 | The Beat “Apple censors underground comics classics” Heidi McDonald 8/9/11. | “An Uncensored Look at Banned Comics” Michael Dooley Print Magazine. Vol 68, #1 (February 2014)

Intersection for the Arts: Battle Emblems (2006), Terror? (2006), Gate (2006), Determining Domain (2012). These exhibitions were organized by Kevin Chen, with Kim as a historian and researcher. Battle Emblems explored the origins of 13 famous symbols used in labor and protest movements, like the peace sign, the AFL-CIO hand-in-hand logo, and the raised fist. It also included new artwork by Favianna Rodriquez, Jessica Tully, Yaeger Moravia Rosenberg & Marcelo Viana, as well as material from the UOUON Poster Archive (pdf, review from SF Station with photos). It was the Battle Emblems show that inspired me to write several papers on union labels. Terror? opened on 9/11, 2006 showing 8 x 10 artworks by over 250 artists, Kim’s contribution “It Could Happen Here,” is above. Determining Domain was an exploration of appropriation, parody, and other IP issues in contemporary art with new art by Bigface, Scott Kildall & Nathaniel Stern, Sanaz Mazinani, Farnaz Shadravan, Stephanie Syjuco, & Scott Tsuchitani (read more). Gate was a photography installation to be viewed from the street as part of an art walk in Intersection’s Mission neighborhood. It was Kim’s first collaboration with Wendy Crittenden.

Bay Area Now 5, “Syndicate,” YBCA. “Syndicate” (2008) was an ambitious project that featured street stencils of historic photos celebrating unionized art and technical workers downtown and at Civic Center. Walking tours were led by Kim, LARC’s Catherine Powell, and lead artist Jessica Tully. There was also a gallery component that featured an installation by Tully and photos by Wendy Crittenden and Tom Griscom.

San Francisco State University: Eco: Art About the Environment (2005), High 5 (2005), AfroCuba (2005), Witness to War: Revisiting Vietnam in Contemporary Art (2007). Kim worked on these shows as part of SFSU’s exhibition design class. Eco featured art by Chester Arnold, Mark Brest van Kempen, Paul Catanese, Cheryl Coon, Robert Dawson, Amy Franceschini + Michael Swaine, Isabella Kirkland, Reuben Lorch-Miller, David Maisel, Hector Dio Mendoza. Philip Ross, Carol Selter, and Leslie Shows. High 5, which ran in conjunction with Eco, celebrated the re-opening of the de Young Museum with public art in Civic Center and Golden Gate Park. The High 5 were Lewis DeSoto, Ann Chamberlain, Wang Po Shu, Mildred Howard, & John Roloff.

Independently of the class, Kim was hired to coordinate public programming for Eco and High Five with the SF Arts Commission, the Fine Arts Museums, the Stribling Arboretum, SFSU, and KQED. Kim also displayed her own pastel paintings in student exhibitions at the Legion of Honor Museum, including The Jaguar Twins in the Underworld, shown above.

Witness to War featured artwork by Thai Bui, Binh Danh, Harrell Fletcher, Joyce Kozloff, An-My Lê, Dinh Q. Lê, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Long Nguyen, & Martha Rosler. Kim also organized public programs for this show.

Afrocuba displayed the work of 26 artists residing in Havana and Santiago de Cuba, included 60 prints and drawings masterfully executed in a variety of techniques, among them lithography, collagraph, woodcut, screen print, and ink and crayon drawing. It was the last faculty show curated by retiring Professor Judith Bettleheim. Artists displayed were José Julián Aguilera, Joel Aguilera Tamayo, Raúl Alfaro Torres, Belkis Ayón, Diana Balboa, Choco (Eduardo Roca Salasar), Juan Roberto Diago Durruthy, Nelson Domínguez Cedeño, Alexis Esquivel, Roberto Fabelo, Ramón Haití Eduardo, Jorge Knight Vera, Miguel Ángel Lobaina, Raúl Martínez. Manuel Mendive, Ibrahim Miranda, José Omar, Marta María Pérez Bravo, Armando Posse, Rafael Queneditt Morales, Mauricio Reyes Aranda, Arnaldo Rodríguez Olazábal, Elio Rodríguez Valdes, Israel Tamayo Zamora, & Rafael Zarza.

Silent Film Star Monte Blue

I lived in Hollywood through most of the 1980's. While visiting LA for a conference a couple of years ago, I visited my old neighborhood. One of the things I most wanted to see again was my Uncle Monte Blue's (1887-1963) star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6286 Hollywood Blvd (Hollywood & Vine), where he was enshrined on February 8, 1960. In 1959, he married Betty Jean Munson, my father's oldest sister. Monte was 72 and Betty was 42. I don’t remember it, but my parents told me I was introduced to him as an infant.

Uncle Monte had an all-American rags-to-riches story. Half French, half Cherokee, his birth name was Gerard Montgomery Bluefeather. Born in Indianapolis, he was placed in an orphanage as a child, yet he persevered, making it through Purdue University and excelling at all sports and physical activities. Blue was discovered by director D.W. Griffith while working as a day laborer on the set of The Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith observed him one day, standing on a soapbox giving a heated speech about capital and labor. Later, when another actor playing the part of a stump speaker wasn't sufficiently inspiring, Griffith remembered Blue and gave him a chance. He continued on in supporting roles until his breakthrough role as the hero Danton in Griffith's French Revolution-era epic Orphans of the Storm (1921) opposite the Gish sisters, Lillian and Dorothy. He was the romantic lead in a long string of silent films through the 1920's. He successfully made the transition into "talkies" and continued to work as a character actor for film and television. One of his best remembered roles was as the sheriff in Key Largo, the 1948 film noir film directed by John Huston starring Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Lauren Bacall, and Lionel Barrymore. He retired from acting in 1954. He suffered a fatal heart attack while visiting Wisconsin on business in 1963 (Filmography IMDB | Cyrano Silent Movies).

1920's era postcard found at Paradise Leased.

Uncle Monte owned a house at 1019 N. Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills. The house was sold to George Gershwin, who lived there for a year, during which he composed Rhapsody in Blue. Later the house was sold to the singer Rosemary Clooney, who kept it for 50 years. It was demolished in 2005. Story/photos at Gershwin House.

My Aunt Betty Munson Blue, his widow, came from a family of artists and trained at the Ecole de Beaux Arts Palace (Fontainebleau, France). After Monte’s death, she opened The Monte Blue Art Center in Beverly Hills on Wilshire near Doheny, a block from the old Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences building at 8949 Wilshire, where she taught traditional oil painting until about 1980. I traveled from Michigan to California several times to take lessons at her school as a child (1971 photo in the slideshow above). Betty attracted many Hollywood clients, notably the comedian Red Buttons, and Alan Hale, who played the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island. She relocated to Seminole, Florida in her later years, where she started the Monte Blue Art Center, teaching painting to disabled people. She died in 1996 (obit in the Tampa Bay Times).

In 2022, a random person emailed me to say “You mention that Monte Blue was Cherokee. There is no documentation of Cherokee membership in his family going back three or four generations. He made it up. His family was of Dutch/German origins and their surname was Blauw, a Dutch name changed to Blue. His real name was not Bluefeather. Check his heritage and family tree by members of his family on Ancestry. No Indian heritage whatsoever.” I have not researched this, and do not know if there is truth to this statement.

Kim in SFSU Magazine

Got a nice blurb about “Women in Comics” and my UPM book “Comic Art in Museums” in the Fall/Winter San Francisco State Magazine.

Women Looking for Freedom in Comics (Publico)

During May and June, Trina Robbins and I answered questions about Women in Comics for Jose Marmeleira from the Portuguese publication Publica. Jose used our discussion of comics history and the goals of the exhibition as a lead in to an interesting discussion of comics by women in Portugal. Here is the original article in Portuguese: https://www.publico.pt/2020/05/31/culturaipsilon/noticia/mulheres-procura-liberdade-banda-desenhada-1917959. Portuguese language PDF (includes all images). Thanks to Jeff Trexler, we have an English translation as follows:

Women looking for freedom in comics

At the Society of Illustrators museum in New York, the Women in Comics: Looking Forward and Back exhibition remains closed to the public, but that did not prevent the PUBLIC from speaking to the two curators. Travel to the world of artists dedicated to ninth art, with scale in Portugal: a new, vibrant, plural and open reality that has been built in recent years.

An exhibition in New York, Women in Comics: Looking Forward and Back, sets the tone for a trip (with a stopover in Portugal) to a vibrant and plural world that has consolidated itself in recent years

The history of comics was and is made up of many women, authors, artists. A debatable proposition, readers of the classics will say; at the very least, silly, lay people will replicate. For both, the authors of BD are five, six, come on, seven names of men. The spontaneity of such a response is tolerated, its ignorance of the past and the present is regretted. Give in: the male presence in this art is greater, but as there are so many and so different works made by women... An inexhaustible myriad, gushing with styles, traits, sensibilities, interests, tastes, inclinations, contexts. And in several geographies.

Yes, there is a story that is being told, that is becoming visible. Take the United States and Portugal, two countries with very different traditions and conditions. In both, exhibitions, publications, projects conducted or made by women multiply. In both, there were meetings of female artists with BD, meetings that still rest under a diffuse and ashamed half-light. Not for much longer.

In New York, at the Society of Illustrators museum, an exhibition, now suspended by the virus, brings together a heterogeneous group of American artists and authors. The curatorship is by author Trina Robbins, an essential figure in the American underground, and art historian Kim A. Munson. Note the eloquence of the title Women in Comics: Looking Forward and Back, suggesting a pendulum movement from the future to the past, passing through the present.!

The first major core of works focuses on the collection of Trina Robbins, rediscovering artists who published between 1911 and 1970: Virginia Krausmann, Martha Orr, Lily Renée, Ramona Fradon and Tarpé Mills, among others. "It is a very important collection, it allows investigating significant phases of the history of women who did comics in the United States," says Kim Munson to the PUBLIC. "It includes the Flapper period associated with the 1920s, World War II, when women drew adventure comics while men fought, the 1950s comics romance, and extends to the underground comics of the 1970s. Many women, like Nell Brinkley, in the 1920s, or Dale Messick, creator of reporter Brenda Starr [a character that peaked in the 1950s, on the pages of the Sunday Chicago Tribune], were real stars.

Without prejudice to the surprising quality of the works of these authors, the 70s represented, with the explosion of the underground and small publications, a pivotal period that establishes a link with the second nucleus of the exhibition. Dedicated to contemporary times, it displays boards by Emil Ferris, awarded last year at the Angoulême Festival, Ebony Flowers, Colleen Doran, Gabrielle Bell, Trinidad Escobar, Margot Ferrick, Noel Franklin, Summer Pierre, Tillie Walden and Kriota Willberg, among others. But turn to the 70s. "Women have always done different types of comics, but, until then, subjects were more restrained. Only with the appearance of the underground movement did rape, abortion or menstruation begin to be addressed ", explains Trina Robbins.

This author, the first woman to draw the superheroine Wonder Woman, stood out inside the movement, which emerged in the city of Berkeley, California. In response to the violence and sexism she saw in Robert Crumb's comics, she would produce, in 1970, with Barbara "Willy" Mendes, It Ain't Me, Babe, the first female comic book anthology. Two years later, she would help found the Wimmen's Comix collective, which would give title to a publication. In her pages, for the first time in the history of American comics, a drawn woman spoke freely about her homosexuality. A border was broken with boards and vignettes, drawings and words.

It was an era that opened the comic to the exploration of more serious themes, and not just related to sexuality ", adds Kim Munson. "For example, there is work like Soldier's Heart, in which the author, Carol Tyler, sought to make sense of her father's experience in World War II. Readers were trained for works that dealt with rape, male violence, abusive relationships. Some can be read in Drawing Power: Women's Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival, a volume edited by Diane Noomin, and seen at the exhibition.

Alongside this transformation, Trina Robbins and Kim Munson point out another, which nourishes the multiplication of perspectives and graphic records. "In terms of production and publication, today everything is possible. There are more and more schools that allow their art students to earn master's degrees in Comics and present their projects in that format. More and more artists are working in more than one medium, introducing modern art techniques in their work. Gallery exhibitions are becoming more popular and works that work on both a page and a gallery wall are not uncommon.

We are the other

In Portugal, this is still not quite the case, but something is definitely changing. More and more women artists are making comics, celebrating the freedom, boldness and desire of American pioneers. In small publications or fanzines, in small groups or alone, using various types of techniques, including digital. Now expanding the comic in the direction of other languages, or making her withdraw in an introspective, but no less creative, question.

Before fixing on in the present, however, the challenge of Women in Comics: Looking Forward and Back is reversed. Observe, first, the past, more rigorously the period between the late 1980s and the early years of the 21st century. It was within this time frame that Alice Geirinhas (Évora, 1964) and Isabel Carvalho (Porto, 1977), two visual artists, discovered and realized the potential of BD, before moving away from it, although not completely.

It was a universe that entered my life when I was a student of Fine Arts, in Lisbon ", says the first. "Above all, she liked the speech of the less commercial comic, that of the more imperfect, stranger, more incomplete comic. The comics of American superheroes did not interest me at all, and although I knew some authors, it was also not the Franco-Belgian comic that attracted me.

Alice Geirinhas' wishes were different: to explore comics as a crossing of "means and experiences, to experience the possibilities of text, image and time. Still in college, in the company of other artists (João Fonte Santa, José da Fonseca), she discovered in the fanzine support that allowed her to control the entire creative and dissemination process. "Our work fled the canons of comics and the informality of this process allowed us to escape the regime of mainstream publishers. We conducted graphic experiments with freedom. The context in Portugal was not, at the time, one of the most stimulating, so it was necessary to be attentive to unusual appearances, such as the exhibition dedicated to the French collective Bazooka, organized in 1986 by the Franco-Portuguese Institute. "It was a very curious, subversive group. Olivia Clavel, who was very experienced with comics, was one of the elements with whom I felt the most affinities. These were the comics I was looking for.

In the 90s, contemporary art, illustration and comics overlapped the artist's path. In 1995, at Galeria Zé dos Bois, she made her first individual exhibition, Our Need for Consolation is Impossible to Satisfy, with serigraphs that simulated vignettes, and began to make illustrations for the weekly O Independente. She publishes in several comic books (Quadrado, Lx Comics) and participates in group exhibitions. But in the late 1990s, the provision changed. Alice Geirinhas' interest in BD faded, while asserting her presence in the circuit of contemporary art galleries.

However, Isabel Carvalho had already entered the scene. As a student at the Escola Superior de Belas Artes do Porto, she discovered a space of freedom in comics. "At the time, what dominated [at school] was a kind of abstract expressionism, a very material painting, which I did not understand", recalls the artist currently represented by Galeria Quadrado Azul. "It was also a very masculine job. To do BD was to go against it all. Against the divisions between the arts, against a system that is too masculine, against a type of painting.

The so-called alternative comic offered Isabel Carvalho greater freedom in exposing the contents and organizing the graphic elements. A restless and intense lightness. "Contact with this type of comics emerged at the International Comics Hall of Porto, which was very important for my journey. In its 2000 edition, I met authors and publishers. And from there came a deeper interest.

With Pedro Nora came the magazine Satellite Internacional. She also published in the Square, but just as Alice Geirinhas would discreetly move away from boards and vignettes. "It is very complicated to do cartoons in Portugal, and I went away. I contacted BD again when I started teaching a course in 2006 at the Escola Superior Artística de Guimarães, which ended in 2012. Since then, Isabel Carvalho has continued to exhibit in galleries and publish books, but has never shown comics again. "I realized that I couldn't be an artist being in both worlds, that I had to choose one, and I went to the arts. I have been doing comics, but I have no intention of publishing them," she reveals. Alice Geirinhas also approached the visual record of the comic, collaborating with a visual essay on women in Portuguese comics for the project Estrela Decadente, by Xavier Almeida. But it will not be rigorous to say that the two artists continue to be authors of comics.

With some melancholy, Isabel Carvalho recalls a moment when contemporary art shared the same space with BD, precisely by Trina Robbins. "It took place in Porto 2001 [European Capital of Culture], in an exhibition curated by Ute Meta Bauer, at the invitation of Miguel Von Hafe Pérez. It was called First Story: Build Female / New Narratives for the 21st Century. It was a time when all borders were broken down. That said, the obstacles you encountered and encounter as a woman are the same in both areas. "It has, I think, to do with the high degree of experimentalism and innovation that we bring. The other who does, the foreigner. That is why there is always, in the beginning, resistance, rejection.

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