I co-curated an exhibit that opens today at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. Titled Cartoon Tunes: Capturing Music in Comics, it features over 40 pieces of comic art, including a bunch of material I commissioned and edited, between 1992 and 2002, at the magazines Pulse! and Classical Pulse!
The exhibit’s ties to ambient/electronica are relatively few, though there is a biographical piece by Justin Green about Philip Glass‘ days as a cab driver (which I wrote, so blame me for the glaring typo, which Justin says was cleaned up for the piece’s inclusion in some upcoming film about Glass) plus an extended epiphany about a John Adams performance of Arvo Part‘s Tabula Rasa, written and illustrated by Dylan Horrocks. (Unfortunately, time didn’t allow us to include a whimsical piece Tom Hart did for me once upon a time about Brian Eno, nor the lovely collaboration that Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang did in memory of John Cage, nor a particularly harrowing piece that Jon Lewis wrote and Jason Lutes drew about a nightmare scenario at a rave. The piece I wrote about the history of the 8-track tape, which was also drawn by Justin Green, isn’t included, but it is in his collection, Musical Legends, published by Last Gasp.)
I also wrote the exhibition text, which means I got to connect the dots (and asterisks, and curlicues) between Gene Deitch‘s consummate jazz-fiend gag strips and the synaesthetic art of Joan Miro and Josef Albers. (Well, I haven’t been by the museum yet, so I can’t say for sure that made the final edit.)
Cartoon Tunes, whose other co-curator is the hysterical cartoonist Keith Knight, runs from today, May 9, through October 15. There’s a reception on May 23 from 7pm to 9pm. If you’re in San Francisco that Tuesday evening, please do drop by and say hello. More info at cartoonart.org.