Wednesday night, thanks to Art Spiegelman and Phillip Johnston, we found ourselves immersed in a world of wordlessness. With live music, visuals and spoken word, through WORDLESS! Art shared with us images and tales of the artists whose wordless works spoke volumes to an entire community and culture of visual artists, cartoonists and graphic novelists, including himself.
The project definitely left a stamp on campus.
Art started his day on campus by speaking to a convening of students from several different areas of study in UCLA’s Design Media Arts.
Art is beloved by established and emerging artists around the world, including DESMA students here at UCLA. Art’s e-cigarette and coffee were as omnipresent as his wit and wisdom.
Meanwhile, our friends at UCLA Special Collections also took up the cause, creating a display of work from 1930s wood-cut artist Lynd Ward, who was the first graphic novelists and major influence on many artists who followed–including Art Spiegelman.
Scenes from the mini-installation in the Charles E. Young Research Library.
And, on the night of the show we harnessed some creative talent from within our own community to explore one of the concepts from WORDLESS!–that of balancing on a hyphen..between words and pictures, right brain and left brain.
We invited the audience to try their hand at strip-creation here in Royce Hall , under the tutelage of UCLA grad Alexander Hoffman. Check out a video of the workshop courtesy Daily Bruin.
And some of the awesome results:
What did you think of WORDLESS? How do you reconcile your right-brain and left-brain tendencies? How and when do you find yourself “balancing on the hyphen?” Tell us in the comments below.
