Students "pixelated" themselves

While it's not the paper of record, The Eagle ran this nice piece.

The article brings up a great point. Head to www.freecomicbookday.com for a store located in your area that will be giving away free comics on July 3. Let Freedom Reign Ring!

Of course the notion of free comics is nothing new to Kartoon Kings. (The Invisible City, Buried Treasures) and again with this latest book Strange Cargo. If you're in the area of Newcastle in the UK, pick up your free copy of Strange Cargo at the Hatton Gallery.

Otherwise, you'll have to buy Strange Cargo from Printed Matter, but at this price it's practically free -- AND the money goes to a good cause -- namely Printed Matter.

If culture means anything...

A rarely seen Grennan and Sperandio drawing of the late and wonderful Colin de Land is reproduced in the current issue of zingmagazine. It's part of the very sweet and wonderful IF CULTURE MEANS ANYTHING, a survey of some exhibitions that occurred at Colin de Land’s seminal gallery, American Fine Arts Co. Featuring: Mark Dion, Grennan & Sperandio, Art Club 2000, Stephan Dillemuth, Gareth James, Andrea Fraser, Spencer Sweeney, Brian Degraw, Patterson Beckwith, McDermott & McGough, Frank Schroeder, Bernadette Corporation & Alex Bag. With essays by Jackie McAllister & James Fuentes.

Youngsters experience comic art

A nice little blurb on Strange Cargo in the Evening Chronicle.

Comiclopedia

Lambiek is Europe's first and most famous antiquarian comic shop, and is a hallmark in the world of comics. Located in Amsterdam, Lambiek has a great selection of comics in many languages.



Check out the Grennan and Sperandio page in the Lambiek Comiclopedia, an illustrated compendium of over 5,000 international comic artists with biographies and artwork examples.

Strange Cargo from Printed Matter

In case you can't make it to the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle to pick up your FREE copy of Strange Cargo, you can BUY a copy online at Printed Matter.



Strange Cargo at Printed Matter.

A Free Hand

The BALTIC, a contemporary arts center in Gateshead, England, has some free downloadable artists projects in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. Included among them is a supplement to the Grennan and Sperandio project The Hand and the Word, an animated film made in collaboration with a local, community theater, The Progressive Players.


The Hand and the Word in BALTIC No. 13.

BALTIC No. 13 [6.9 MB] is a mixture of images from the animated film, combined with the complete, original text of the short story that the film is based on. Although Edgar Allan Poe is credited as having invented the detective story genre, "The Hand and the Word," a short story by Irish writer Gerald Griffin, was written in 1827, fourteen years before Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."

"The Hand and the Word" (animated, 18 minutes) is available as an NTSC VHS tape in the US through Printed Matter, and all proceeds from the sale go to support that fine organization. "The Hand and the Word" is avaible in the UK as a PAL VHS tape directly from the BALTIC.

Also available are projects by Anish Kapoor, Marijke van Warmerdam and Jenny Holzer.

Out of Town

Simon Grennan & Christopher Sperandio have been commissioned to work with 10 young people from across rural Rother to produce a series of vibrant cartoon portraits. Made in partnership with the sitters, these portraits will include narrative and set out to represent a personal and specific aspect of the youngsters’ lives.


Look for "Out of Town" in The Rye and Battle Observer.

Titled “Out of Town” the portraits will appear once a week for 10 weeks as full colour pages in the Rye and Battle Observer, starting 21 May. This way of distributing artworks will help to engage a new audience, taking contemporary culture right into the living room of around 18,000 local residents, some of whom may never have visited a gallery before.

Plop!

Plop: Recent Projects from the Public Art Fund
Plop features projects by forty-five internationally acclaimed artists whose installations were made possible by the Public Art Fund. In addition to Grennan and Sperandio's Invisible City, there's documentation of works by Vanessa Beecroft, Rachel Whiteread, Christian Boltanski, Tony Oursler, Roxy Paine, Takashi Murakami, Louise Bourgeois, Dan Graham, Barbara Kruger, Nam June Paik, Juan Muñoz and Pipilotti Rist, and more.

Comic Release in Pasadena

When you're in Pasadena, drop in and see Grennan and Sperandio's Invisible City. It's part of Comic Release: Negotiating Identity for a New Generation,an exhibition of works by artists who use cartoon and comic imagery, graphic novelists and artists who make and distribute zines. Comic Release will be on view at the Armory Center for the Arts, 145 North Raymond Avenue, Old Pasadena. The exhibition runs from June 27 through August 15, 2004. There will be a public opening reception on Saturday, June 26, from 7 - 9 p.m.

The catalogue for the exhibition is on sale at Amazon.com.

Spacewalk for the Hayward

Grennan & Sperandio have created a new 3 1/2 minute animated film for the Hayward Gallery's Waterloo Sunset, featuring skateboarders who skate the Undercroft at the South Bank Centre _ one of oldest and most iconic skate sites in the UK.


A still from Spacewalk_sk8ing The Undercroft.

Spacewalk _ Sk8ing The Undercroft focuses on 'hard-to-perfect' classic skate tricks and makes use of a cunning mix of real-time video, rotoscoping, classic cell animation and 2D puppeting. The artists also created new midi versions of tunes from famous Giuseppe Verdi operas as the film's dominant electronic audio.

On view April 6 - October 6, 2004.

Strange Cargo

For the Hatton Gallery at the University of Newcastle, UK, Strange Cargo is a new 24-page color comic book illustrating the personal experiences of area young people with the Hatton Gallery's unique and idiosyncratic collections.



The book (distributed through schools and youth groups in an edition of 30,000) contains different narratives that illuminate aspects of the Hatton's collection from the narrator's point of view. Narratives contain prompts for activities that can be undertaken by readers/visitors outside the context of the comic book, but which are suggested by the story and lead back to the Gallery's collections.

If you can't make it to Newcastle to pick up a copy, you can visit Printed Matter, either in person in New York or via their web site and purchase a copy of Strange Cargo. Proceeds go to help support Printed Matter, a very fine aritsts book store.

Dates and Details
Grennan and Sperandio make comic books for as artworks museums including the Museum of Modern Art/PS1 and New York's Public Art Fund and in conjunction with publishers such as Fantagraphics Books and DC Comics. Strange Cargo is their 13th comic. The exhibition "Strange Cargo" launches September 2004. This installation will feature a new, 80,000 square foot temporary wall painting by Grennan & Sperandio incorporating important items from the Hatton Gallery collection as featured in the Strange Cargo comic book.