OHC cosponsors “Art of the News: Comics Journalism”

Comics journalism is a humanistic practice with special relevance to the University of Oregon (UO). It

From Joe Sacco’s non-fiction graphic novel Palestine, which depicts his experiences in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in December 1991 and January 1992.

was at UO that the founder of contemporary comics journalism, Joe Sacco, obtained his degree in journalism. “For Sacco’s first series Palestine, he went to the occupied territories in the early 1990s as a journalist. He was unsatisfied with what we would consider mainstream journalism reporting on the Middle East. He wanted to go and document this for himself. He felt the best way to do so was by drawing,” says associate director of the UO Comics and Cartoon Studies Program Kate Kelp-Stebbins.

Professor Kelp-Stebbins and Ben Saunders, director of the Comics and Cartoon Studies Program, have co-curated an exhibition at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art called “Art of the News: Comics Journalism.” The exhibition is supported by the OHC’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities. The exhibition brings together a number of contemporary works for the first major retrospective of the genre, highlighting recent work from Sacco along with other artists working in the field.

Focusing on the methods and techniques that each artist uses, the show also highlights the ethical imperative that drives this form of documentation. Repudiating both the ever-increasing rapidity of the 24-hour news cycle as well as the valorization of journalistic objectivity, journalists who use comics and graphic narrative to document current events and human rights struggles insist that accurate witnessing takes time and involves human subjects. 

“I find comics journalism to be not simply what we might consider a genre or a form, I actually think of it as an ethic. The people who are working in comics journalism have a very specific reason for doing so. The sorts of stories that they tell and the ways that they tell them are very human-minded. They’re interested in slowly creating relationships with the people that they’re interviewing,” says Kelp-Stebbins.

From In/Vulnerable: Inequity in the Time of Pandemic, illustrated by Thi Bui in collaboration with The Nib, an online comics publication and Reveal.

From displaced persons in refugee camps to frontline workers in a pandemic, the humans who drive comics journalism are likewise rendered by the work of human hands, which draw and record their stories. In the age of Russian bots and fake news, comics journalism reframes conceptualizations of accuracy and truth. The Comics Journalism exhibition will demonstrate the urgency of such art through carefully curated and researched installations and objects.

Kelp-Stebbins talks about the field of Comics Studies and the “Art of the News” exhibition in her UO Today interview. The exhibition is on view at the JSMA through January 16, 2022. Visit jsma.uoregon.edu for more information.