More details available here.

The June 27 opening is not to be missed. Chicago artist (and force behind Brain Frame) Lyra Hill will perform a live interpretation of her comic Go Down, a story that follows a teenage girl who buys a magic crystal before meeting her boyfriend in a park. Lyra will project the comic panel by panel in a video slideshow, using a loop and effects pedal to build soundscapes and voice for each character. Elizabeth White from New York City will initiate her project Labor, which will track exhibition participant’s efforts putting the show together. And DC-based Carolina Mayorga will work through themes of race and domestic work. Like, literally. In the gallery. At the opening. It will be awesome.

Several interactive, collaborative projects will open on July 27, but run through the month of the exhibition. The Search for Modesty, an installation/performance/residency/collaboration between Yasmin Nair and Gretchen Hasse, will situate the pair in-gallery to co-create a comic based on the life and times of Modesty Blaise, the super thief and then super-sleuth literary creation of Peter O’Donell. In addition to employing a unique collage technique, Hasse and Nair will script, thumbnail, pencil, and ink a segment of a story that links Modesty Blaise to the artists’ biographies, weaving together ideas and experiences to take a personal and political look at the influence of Modesty.

The collaborative mural The Wall of the Unknown by Chicago-based artists Polly Yates, Elliott Junkyard, Danielle Chenette, and Sarah Bell will map and record the four artists exploration of the themes of sex and gender through their shared disciplines of drawing and collage. The mural will be initiated at the opening and will be completed during the run of the exhibition.

The rad new project Cash Kitty, by sex-tech-and-politics reporter Melissa Gira Grant, will use a collaborative approach to meme-making combining cats (of course!) and Impact font. Inspired by the feature “Cats and Stacks” on the sex work blog Tits and Sass, Cash Kitty asks collaborators in the sex industry to take photos of the money they made in a night with their pets, and caption it with what they spent the money on, as a way of exploring the economic impact of sex work.

That’s the stuff you can look at: but what can you do? Interactive installations include giant coloring posters from Jacinta Bunnell thumb-tacked to the walls that will invite participants to color and feel like a big ol’ kid again. Burnell believes community coloring promotes discussion of gender, sexism, homophobia, candy, manarchy, playground and friendship and we believe her (she had us at gender). Liz Rush’s If You Do invites participants to interact with a large-format graphic gamebook. And Francis Kang and others from the Ladydrawers documentary crew eagerly await your presence, to ask you questions for about sex, money, race, and gender in cultural production for the Ladydrawers documentary. We know you’re not camera shy!

Ladydrawers founder and exhibition co-curator Anne Elizabeth Moore will also present a new interactive work called Sentimental. The project asks visitors to rewrite the Declaration of Sentiments—a women’s movement text written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and contemporaries intending to respond to, reflect, and correct the Declaration of Independence—in a text that will be reprinted, later, on the printing press that printed Stanton’s original in 1848. Over a century and a half later, Sentimental asks: What have women’s movements in the US accomplished for gender diversity and sexual health?

To extend the conversation beyond typical opening and closing night events, we’ve engineered a series of startling, amazing, captivating workshops. We’re not bragging on their awesomeness, by the way. It’s just a fact. The workshops will feature comics artists, educators, writers, and theorists that will facilitate talks and group projects on sex, money, gender, and race. Renowned comics and fine artist Esther Pearl Watson and health educator, artist, and writer Terri Kapsalis will create an updated sexual health version of Mort Walker’s Lexicon of Comicana, for example, and Delia Jean and Sarah Jaffe will take a look at what it take to make an honest living in the food service industry in a workshop called Life and Labor.

Of course we’ll also have a library, stocked with new and beloved releases created by exhibitors of S. M. R. G., Ladydrawers and other participating artists. We’ll have a reading room of sorts, where explorers of the exhibition will be invited to hang out and read some of the independently published work of their peers.

So, admit it. You love this idea and can’t wait to participate. Save the Date for the S. M. R. G. (STD SMRG): June 27 – July 27, 2013. See you then!

It contains our latest creation, a survey about emotional labor! We’re asking food service workers to participate by filling out a quick chart after each work shift. We’re seeking to gather data about how you feel at the end of your workday. By gauging the levels of happiness, stress, and pride people experience in an average day, we aim to expand upon and better define the concept of emotional labor. This information will be used to fuel discussion and creativity at Life and Labor, a workshop led by cartoonist Delia Jean and journalist Sarah Jaffe. (You can also download the survey here: but please return it to us at the email address below when you’re done!)

We encourage participants to share stories, drawings and notes about their on-the-job experiences. Just place them in the pre-addressed envelope and send them along with your completed survey! For more information, please email deliajean84@gmail.com. Thank you for your help with this project!

This won’t surprise fans of Corman, who in addition to creating comics, is also an illustrator, a belly dancer, and an educator. She moved a few years ago from her beloved NYC to Gainesville, Florida, to establish the Sequential Artists Workshop with her husband the educator and comics creator Tom Hart. Shortly after their arrival, the couple lost their young daughter Rosalie. (Hart’s incredible work on her life and loss can and should be read here.)

Corman, in other words, is also a remarkable person. Strong, thoughtful, and intelligent—as you’ll be able to read for yourself in her responses to my questions on Unterzakhn below.

Interviews, reviews, and casual mentions of the book all hint or state outright that it’s an “eerily contemporary” story of womanhood. Were there women’s issues you came across in your research that surprised you? Any that didn’t?

I did begin [the book] with an intention to talk about the gruesome results of not having a choice in our reproductive lives. There’s very little that surprises me, in history or contemporary life, but I’m often shocked. Most of that came not so much from what I discovered about women’s lives, but about the ways people in general lived in New York City and presumably other cities in that time period, and a bit earlier. The lack of sanitation, of public infrastructure that we all take for granted now. If you didn’t live in a rich neighborhood …

One of the most compelling aspects of the book is that you unite a couple of different modes of mark-making: the result comes off in its best moments as barely controlled havoc. How did you settle on a visual style for this story, and what were you intending it to do that the narrative might not otherwise accomplish?

When I first had the idea for this book, I knew I had to develop my cartooning style away from what it had been before. In Subway Series I was trying to get away from all of my training, and draw in a very cartoony way, not representational. Afterwards, I looked back at some of the minicomics I did in college, and realized that I actually liked some of that style, and wanted to bring it back. Other than all that, what happens in the process of drawing is more organic than most would seem to realize. It’s not like we think really long and hard before we work about EXACTLY how it should look. If we did that, we’d never draw a line, and whatever we did draw would be contrived and terrible.

The Unterzakhn characters first appeared in Scheherezade, Megan Kelso’s brilliant 2004 anthology that, due to an uncorrected printing error, limited broad support for and readership of the book. The history of comics is riddled with such minor occurrences that, when stacked, limit women’s visibility in the form. How do you feel you reflect/reject/respond to those moments as a professional cartoonist? As an educator? As someone who’s deeply gender aware? And did the first appearance of these characters in this frustrated project influence the mode in which you wanted them to appear thereafter?

For specific answers about whether there was a gender component to the problems with Scheherazade, I’d ask Megan. I’d be curious to hear her answer, actually. But I’m more concerned with the way the comics industry and the world of media, conferences, and conventions treats us than with the way some piddly little book press does. I just got an email update from the organizers of SPACE in Ohio next week, and the first item on it was a promo for an exhibit of female cartoonists’ art called Panels In Pink. I am so disgusted by that name on so many levels. It’s not that it sounds girly—I LIKE girly. It sounds grandma, and not in a good way. It sounds like doilies and pink frilly toilet seats. It sounds dismissive and vaguely gynecological.

I’m also disturbed by the ongoing assumption that women all do autobiographical work. I am beginning to find it very sexist. I am thinking now of that traveling show of Jewish cartoonists—they excluded everyone who doesn’t do autobio, like we somehow don’t know our proper place, which is parked in front of the mirror, apparently, and not budging from our own gaze and internal monologue. This is not to dismiss the artists who are doing strong autobiographical work. All the art in that show is unassailable. It’s the organizational ethos that I object to.

You are—and Unterzakhn underscores this—strongly identified with New York City, but you live in Florida now. What precipitated the move and how does the school you opened there, SAW, fit into your creative practice?

We got burnt out on NYC, and when the economy went to shit we really felt it, Tom through lowered enrollment at SVA (which meant fewer classes per semester) and me through a severe drop in the amount of illustration work I got. We’d spent a lot of time here in Gainesville, had a lot of friends here, and really liked the lifestyle here. Tom had the idea to open the school, and spent a couple of years making it a reality. It’s taking off beautifully. In NYC the answer to most questions is “No”. Here it’s yes. Here, I have a cheap private studio space a short walk from my house, Tom has a great space for the school, we both have radio shows. There are certainly tradeoffs. Because of the horrible thing we went through soon after we moved here, it’s very difficult for me to parse out what problems I’m having that are due to that, and what comes from missing or being away from NYC. As a dancer, I’m having a harder time finding my footing, but again, that is partially due to personal circumstances. Although I really do legitimately miss certain things I can’t have here.

A lot of artists are leaving New York. It’s no longer a good place to be a working artist, though it is certainly a great place to be a creative person or a lover of the arts. But there’s absolutely no support for artists at the individual level there. If you’re an institution or a famous artist with a lot of money and backing, you’re set. But if you’re just one of the army of individual artists who lives there, you can really have problems. Studio space costs a lot of money and is usually inadequate – $200/month for just enough space for a desk?! Not to mention the rest of the cost of living? Forget about painting, or anything else that requires a little more room. Typically what happens is that you find your projects become longer and more demanding, and less remunerative in the short term, which means that you quickly begin to fall behind the 8-ball. This seems to be a pattern once you get a little older and have a real life, not the kind of stuff you do in your 20′s when it’s easier to work for The Man all day and then go home and burn it on your own projects all night.

When you live there, you’re under the illusion that it’s the best place to be an artist, because there’s so much culture there and because it’s the media capital of America. But then you go to Seattle, Portland, almost any other good city in the U.S., and you see that the support for the arts is so much better outside of NYC. It’s infuriating after a while.

As a bellydancer, cartoonist, and educator, do you feel your career has been influenced by your own comfort with or interest in femininity, or the gender roles you may have been placed in by others? How and why?

I feel like I’m becoming more and more of a feminist as I get older. Getting older, becoming a parent, all these things have played a role. And just observing the world. I’d have to be fucking blind not to move more in that direction. I grew up in a very egalitarian family—gender was truly a non-issue with us, and still is not [an issue]. So it took me a long time to see how far behind the rest of the world is. My parents made it look effortless. Now I think they must have given it some thought. Because look at the rest of the world. I’ve come to believe that most people on this planet hate women.

Unterzakhn presents a complex relationship between femininity and maternity. I responded to it as someone who’s essentially uninterested in maternity, but is very invested in femininity. How do you feel those two notions overlap, in your life and in the world?

Ugh. I don’t even know if I can properly answer that question except to say that women deal in blood and guts, literally and figuratively, whether they have kids or not. We are at the gates of life and death. As far as the story itself goes, much of it is about the characters having to really fight and buck expectations of their time in order to have the lives they want, or think they want, or even just the lives they can live with. It was always a given that neither of the sisters would want to marry or have kids. It would get in the way of their plans.

Although underpants apparently played a role in the marketing of the book, I haven’t come across anyone asking you about them in particular. In my mind, underthings are a continually relevant metaphor for the hidden labor of women, made clear to me during, you know, the riot grrrl days we both came up in, when wearing slips as clothes was a visual way of demanding recognition in culture without abandoning sexuality. Why did you choose Unterzakhn as your title, and why do you think underclothes are so persistently associated with femininity?

Have you looked at men’s underwear? It’s so boring! We get so many more choices, bits and bobs and lace and sparkles, or plain and simple, or really whatever we want. Women’s lingerie has always been fun to look at and to draw, although not always fun to wear. Actually, this makes me think of something that DID surprise me in my research. The underthings that women wore in different time periods are sometimes shocking! Sleeves packed with horsehair! Metal corsetry! Can you imagine shoving yourself into that crap? In an early 20th century clothing catalog, I came across a page of nursing corsets. Having nursed a child, I can tell you that wearing any of those things would be hell. So I think these items are not just a metaphor for the hidden labors of women, but for all of the contortions and miseries our ancestors had to put themselves through just to be allowed to exist in public. We’re really fortunate now to be freed from all that garbage.

Of course, this is just in the so-called “West”. I don’t know what women wore beneath their clothes in Asia and in the Islamic world. In the latter, I think the emphasis was more in what women wore OVER their “inside” clothes. Certainly in the Ottoman Empire you did not just walk out the door in your indoor clothing. But I don’t know what went beneath it. I need to research that.

Artwork Due to gallery: June 19, 2013

The Ladydrawers Comics Collective (AKA “The Ladydrawers”) is a ridiculous, amazing, and largely pointless endeavor that combines a love of giggling with a display of moxie the likes of which have never before been seen in this universe, or in others glimpsed on late-night sci fi television programs.

We are a loose and lawless collaboration between women, men, transgender, and non-binary gender folk, with skill levels ranging from professional to enthusiast. We research, perform, and publish comics and texts about how economics, race, sexuality, and gender impact the comics industry, other media, and our culture at large. Sometimes there are puppets. Often there are charts. Pie is not irrelevant. (Real pie, not a pie chart, although we use those quite a bit too.) Cats, jokes about cats, and inside jokes that sound like they are about other things but are actually about cats form the secondary basis for our pedagogical investigations.

This summer we will undertake a new project in Chicago, a workshop series and exhibition. It is an exciting summer program at the crux of innovative art-making practices, social commentary, and critical pedagogy. Unfortunately cats are not allowed in the gallery space. Otherwise it would just have been an exhibition of cuteness. Instead, apparently, it has to be art.

This is where you come in. As a curiosity-driven, friendly team of amateur researchers, performers, comics creators, and educators, we’ll be supplying some of the artwork, workshops, and original murals for the exhibition from the crew of people who have worked with us or hung around in the past. But we also want to work with you.

We’re seeking work for display, workshop leaders, and collaborative muralists for our very exciting summer program. We are open to your creative and fun cultural production ideas that focus on any two areas in our set of concerns: economics, race, sexuality and gender. These can be performance-based, cultural interventions, or Bristol Board. We will also have a reading room, where we would be more than happy to consider a book you submit. Perhaps you want to have a wall where people write down how much money they think various superheroes are worth? Maybe you have recreated a scene from Maus in cheesecake that is fraught with gender conflicts. Or, likely, you just make incredibly cool illustrations / comics / paintings / sculptures about trying to get by. We want to see ‘em.*

Please include a short biographical statement in a word document and up to three JPG images of less than 1MB each. These can be of separate works, or of separate views of the same work. Do not send more than three images. If you are proposing a workshop, please send a separate word doc describing the workshop. If you would like to be considered a muralist, please indicate so in your cover letter, and send three relevant work samples. We are requesting a $3 entry fee from each applicant (paypal to aem at anneelizabethmoore dot com), but if you cannot pay this fee you should request a waiver in advance. We will not accept submissions that have neither paid this fee nor had this fee waived. Email your submissions to: TheLadydrawers@gmail.com or contact us with questions. PROPOSALS ARE DUE MARCH 1, 2013.

This exhibition will be curated by an as-yet unnamed team of Ladydrawers, including but not limited to Anne Elizabeth Moore. If you are wondering whether or not this will actually get done, what is amazing is that somehow it always does. Preference in selections will be given to trans and non-binary gender creators, women artists, queers, and people of color. We don’t make the rules, we just subvert them.

*Do not send several oil paintings of your own penis. We are not against the inclusion of penises on images of folks of any gender, but tricking us into looking at several pictures of your penis for the sake of art is an abuse of masculine privilege, and we don’t acknowledge that here.

We’re also gearing up to make some very very exciting announcements, very very soon. So we’re going to be shifting things about a bit on the site here, and while it has our attention, you are invited to let us know what else you’d like to see here. We’re about to host our first exclusive interview (with someone very exciting), and start creating more original content, so feel free to think big. Or very tiny! Like a newborn kitty. Cuuuuuute!

In the mean time, of course, our Tumblr’s been going gangbusters, as has the Truthout strip (with this Lyra Hill-drawn strip going crazy viral, what up internet?). Sort of maybe a little bit related, but also mostly not, one of us has done some preliminary research on race and gender in horror films, and you might think that’s cool too.

We also want to give a particular shout-out to Sarah Becan’s-illustrated Truthout strip Mirror, Mirror. It’s the culmination of our first round of investigations into the comics industry, and we’ve taken the month off to recover. When the strip comes back in 2013, we’ll be looking at some of the root causes of gender and race bias, and how they cause economic and legal injustice. It will be great.

Greetings from the Ladydrawers HQ!

This week, we’re headed out to the Dane County Print Explosion. We’ll be exhibiting and hosting a workshop, we’re super excited! Nicole Boyett and Rachel Swanson will be discussing the Ladydrawers’ work and making mini comics in room 2131 of the Humanities building (455 N. Park St.), from 4-5pm on Saturday Nov. 10. Our table in the College Library (600 N. Park St.), will have loads of great stuff! Come say hi! Grab yourself a poster, or a minicomic, or even a copy of Hand Job! We can’t wait to meet you!

-The Ladydrawers

The Ladydrawers make ALL THE THINGS for the print explosion!

Our Bodies, Ourselves is raising money for a very worthwhile cause, to provide every member of Congress with their own copy of this revolutionary book. You can help bring such valuable women’s health information to our legislators by donating to their Indiegogo campaign here and spreading the word.

Ladydrawers is excited to be a part of this project, by providing one of the perks – those who donate $200 will receive a print of our “Legitimate Roadtrip” poster, created and signed by Anne Elizabeth Moore, Nicole Boyett, Sara Drake & Rachel Swanson. So check it out, get excited, and let Congress know how important it is to have accurate sexual health information!

–

Our amazing road trip with Christine Cupiauolo, the managing editor of Our Bodies, Ourselves, made two things really clear.

1. Congress desperately needs accurate, evidence-based information about sexual and reproductive health. OBVIOUSLY there is some misinformation floating around about women’s bodies, although truth be told I suspect just as much misinformation is bandied about in re: dudes.
2. Sex ed is one of the funnest things you can do with your time.

So we’ve devised a way to get more people involved. Afterall, as the project of Our Bodies, Ourselves underscores, there are no greater experts on bodies than their owners: there should be no louder policy advocates than the bodies being legislated.

The latest Truthout strip asks readers to submit questions for a Congressional Pop Quiz on the workings of your body. We’d like you—the cartoonists, the ladydrawers, the gender-aware media makers—to submit illustrated questions. You can use the questions from the Truthout comments section, generate queries among your own communities, or just straight-up ask Akin to identify the different between your vag and, say, a praying mantis. Which, actually, is pretty damn good at shutting “that whole thing down.”

We’d like questions on sex and reproductive health, of course, but questions about gender seem appropriate too. Marriage, partner benefits—it seems a little bit endless, what we must ensure congress knows before further legislation is enacted. Anything. Be creative. Be funny. Be accurate. Use evidence-based resources, and cite them, so interested parties (R, D) can read more.

Most important: submit them to us here at TheLadydrawers@gmail.com or on our Tumblr by October 1. We’ll publish everything we receive here and on our Tumblr that fits the above guidelines (so include your website in your submission for proper credit), and choose the very best ones to print or publish in a quiz we’ll send directly to congress. (We might even have a way to pay you.) Line art only, please!

Can’t draw? Submit your text question on Truthout’s comment section, work with a friend who does like to draw, or do it anyway. You’re the expert: on your body, and on what you want to say about how it should be legislated.