{"id":80517,"date":"2021-07-21T09:08:47","date_gmt":"2021-07-21T13:08:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/?p=80517"},"modified":"2022-10-28T08:51:43","modified_gmt":"2022-10-28T12:51:43","slug":"two-ways-of-exploring-visual-narrative","status":"publish","type":"bu-article","link":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/news\/articles\/2021\/two-ways-of-exploring-visual-narrative\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Ways of Exploring Visual Narrative"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
July 21, 2021<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
\n\t\t\tTwitter<\/span><\/span>\n\t\t\tFacebook<\/span><\/span>\n\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
\"Dana
Photo by Cydney Scott<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This article was first published in <\/span><\/em>BU Today <\/span>on July 21, 2021. By Joel Brown<\/em><\/p>\n

EXCERPT<\/h5>\n

People pick up the <\/span><\/em>Sunday <\/span>New York Times <\/span><\/em>to read the front page or the <\/span><\/em>\u201cBook Review,\u201d <\/span><\/em>to mock the glitzy wedding announcements or tackle the crossword. But over the last year of pandemic and political tumult, Dana Clancy has been picking it up looking for pages to paint on.<\/p>\n

\u201cI paint only on the Sunday <\/span>New York Times<\/em>, keeping or covering the news as the week unwinds in unexpected, often shocking ways,\u201d says <\/span>Clancy<\/a> <\/span>(CFA\u201999), the director of the College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts and an associate professor of art. She paints over part or all of each chosen page with blocks of color, adds portraits of people she\u2019s Zooming with, then adds words, usually things those people have said. \u201cWords written over weeks feel like a shared public space\u2014the kind of space I\u2019m missing and want for all of us,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Begun in September 2020 and now planned to last a year, the project has the working title <\/span>Breaking News\/Broken Year<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It is also, in a way, part of her preparation for the September 2022 launch of a new CFA <\/span>Master of Fine Arts program in Visual Narrative<\/a>, which will integrate fine arts with sequential art storytelling practices, both written and visual. The first year will focus entirely on nonfiction, but in the second year, students\u2019 thesis projects could be nonfiction, perhaps from a collaboration with the <\/span>BU Center for Antiracist Research<\/a> <\/span>or the School of Medicine, or fiction, from a animation informed by a required motion graphics course to a graphic novel like Alison Bechdel\u2019s 2006 best seller <\/span>Fun Home<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn recent years, CFA alumni have become leaders in visual narrative\u2014from the <\/span>Oscar-winning producer<\/a> <\/span>responsible for <\/span>Frozen<\/em> <\/span>to artists whose medical illustrations reveal the truth of crime scenes,\u201d says <\/span>Harvey Young<\/a>, dean of CFA. \u201cThis new program supports the ambitions of smart, talented, creative artists and mentors them along a variety of possible pathways: animated storytelling, graphic novels, medical humanities, and more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Students have been asking for this, Clancy says. \u201cSometimes they called it illustration, sometimes they called it digital drawing.\u201d When she visited the Serious Comics class taught by <\/span>Davida Pines<\/a>, a College of General Studies associate professor and chair of rhetoric, narrative was a big part of the discussion. She planned  the new degree in collaboration with Young, SVA faculty, and others, notably <\/span>Paul Karasik<\/a> <\/span>and <\/span>Joel Christian Gill<\/a>. Karasik, a CFA lecturer, has published cartoons in <\/span>The New Yorker<\/em> <\/span>and is best known as cocreator, with David Mazzuchelli, of the lauded graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster\u2019s novel <\/span>City of Glass<\/em>. Gill (CFA\u201904) an acclaimed cartoonist, author, and associate professor of illustration at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, is working on a graphic novel adaptation of the best seller <\/span>Stamped from the Beginning <\/span><\/em>by <\/span>Ibram X. Kendi<\/a>, BU\u2019s Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and founding director of the Center for Antiracist Research.<\/p>\n

More than a year out from the first classes, there\u2019s already a lot to do, including recruiting students (applications are due in January) and hiring an associate professor to oversee the program (interviews will be held this fall). The multiyear process has already included passing muster with accreditors and the University.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was an organic thing. Students were looking for it. We wanted to look for some degrees that would connect our existing programs,\u201d Clancy says. \u201cAnd these leaders in the field said, hey, let\u2019s talk about comics in narrative format as being a powerful way to tell marginalized stories and stories of conflict.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we really saw over this last year how narrative can spur people to action, whether it\u2019s awful action or really important action,\u201d she says. \u201cThe role of narrative and visual narrative feels more and more important.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read the full article<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

School of Visual Arts director Dana Clancy preps a new MFA program while painting her pandemic experience on New York Times pages<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6310,"featured_media":80518,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"bu_prepress_billboard":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term_manual":""},"tags":[],"bu-publication":[192],"magazine-article-category":[],"magazine-topic":[],"news-article-category":[218,216],"news-topic":[],"bu_edition":[],"media_type":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/80517"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/bu-article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6310"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80517"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/80517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94852,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/80517\/revisions\/94852"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80517"},{"taxonomy":"bu-publication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-publication?post=80517"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-article-category?post=80517"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-topic?post=80517"},{"taxonomy":"news-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-article-category?post=80517"},{"taxonomy":"news-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-topic?post=80517"},{"taxonomy":"bu_edition","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu_edition?post=80517"},{"taxonomy":"media_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media_type?post=80517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}