Louis M. Glackens: Pure Imagination April 14, 2024 through March 30, 2025
Louis Glackens was a trailblazing figure who became one of the first illustrators of animated cartoons from 1915-1920, creating characters for production houses such as Baré, Pathe and Sullivan Studios. His fantastical depictions of mermaids, anthropomorphic beasts and pie-faced grown-ups carved a path for what would become the wonderful world of Walt Disney. Regrettably, Louis Glackens was out of step with the fashion of his time and bared the curse of the avant-garde. As such, his vast contribution to the history of cartoons has remained largely unexplored. This exhibition seizes the opportunity to reevaluate Louis Glackens’ cultural contributions through the gift of hindsight and wealth of illustrations generously gifted to the Museum by The Sansom Foundation, Inc.
What separates Louis from other Puck, Judge and Harper’s cartoonists of his day? Glackens had a particularly fluid style, his draughtsmanship appearing almost instinctive. In William Glackens’ son Ira’s memoir, he described his uncle’s drawings as having, “flowed from his pencil like water from a tap. Like Shakespeare, he never blotted a line.” His confident handling made his imagery very clear and, therefore, well-suited to illustration. His images for Puck are loaded with information and detail, but they remain clear, simple and distinct.
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Thurber House – 40 years in the making
This year, Columbus-born writer, playwright and cartoonist James Thurber would have turned 130.
Thurber was born in 1894 and died, at age 66, in 1961. By comparison, the area nonprofit arts organization that bears his name is just barely entering middle age.
Thurber House will turn 40 this year. The organization, headquartered in a home once occupied by the writer and his family, was founded to further the interest in Thurber. Today, Thurber House functions as both a museum and a literary center, with the primary goal to mandate in promoting writing, authors and books, goes beyond Thurber himself.
During this year of anniversaries, The Dispatch spoke with past and present officials at, or associated with, Thurber House.
“Lines with Power & Purpose” 10th-anniversary exhibit in the Melton Gallery
I’ve always been a fan of editorial cartooning. I have a few hanging in my house that were given to me, or I bought at an auction.
That’s why I was excited to take my Media Ethics students recently to the “Lines with Power & Purpose” 10th-anniversary exhibit in the Melton Gallery at the University of Central Oklahoma. The exhibit displays more than 50 original cartoons from the 20th century.
To begin with the students, I read part of a brief history written by Dr. Brett Sharp for a book about the exhibit when it was first displayed 10 years ago. Sharp wrote that seven of the cartoonists featured in the exhibit won 12 Pulitzer Prizes. One of those was Charles Werner, who won a Pulitzer Prize while he was an editorial cartoonist for The Daily Oklahoman from 1935-1941.
(Dr. Brett Sharp will give a presentation on the 10th anniversary of the “Lines with Power & Purpose” editorial cartoon exhibit at 3 p.m. Thursday in the Melton Gallery, which is in the College of Fine Arts and Design on the UCO campus. The exhibit also can be seen from noon to 5 p.m. Monday to Thursday until April 25.)
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A Father-Son Exhibition Bridges Two Generations of Graphic Art
This summer, more than 120 of [Pulitzer Prize-winning Tom Darcy’s] cartoons will go on display in a cross-generational exhibition at Lower Manhattan’s Nunu Fine Art gallery. Darcy & Darcy: In Monochrome will put his drawings in conversation with over 50 black-and-white paper works and experimental videos by his son, Brad Darcy, displayed across the gallery’s main floor and in its newly opened lower-level exhibition space.
“[We] want to show that two disparate graphic languages — one comically didactic and moralizing, the other witty but purely artistic — can speak with equal force to our shared human concerns,”
