Emil Ferris: My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two exhibition review

reviewed by Laurie Anne Agnese 

Emil Ferris: My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two. Paris: Galerie Martel, November 7, 2024 - January 11, 2025. https://www.galeriemartel.com/emil-ferris-2024/

Like the werewolf stories that she treasures, Emil Ferris’s evolution as an artist started with a bite. “But it wasn’t the bite I thought it would be,” she explains in the Meet Emil Ferris documentary short that was playing at Galerie Martel’s show for My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two. “But it did make me a monster and it made me understand being a monster.”

In 2002, Ferris was celebrating her fortieth birthday when she was bit by a mosquito and contracted West Nile Virus. Ferris woke up from a coma three weeks later to discover her transformation: she was paralyzed from the waist down and unable to use her drawing hand. It closed the chapter of her life as a single mom working to support her six-year-old daughter on various commercial art freelance jobs in Chicago.

“The bite saved my life,” Ferris says. “Because if you lose something that you take for granted, all of a sudden it becomes extremely valuable to you.” She fought back paralysis so she could raise her daughter. She committed to drawing again, this time for her own art and enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. To create the two books that comprise My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Ferris spent 14 years drawing at night, while working odd jobs and struggling with various health and financial issues.

 

Video credit: Meet Emil Ferris, 2019, director Mathieu Gervaise for Monsieur Toussaint Louverture (Ferris’ French publisher)

Ferris’ voice was heard throughout Galerie Martel whose curators placed this looped chapter of the documentary to preface their exhibit of original artworks from the second volume of My Favorite Thing is Monsters. At more than 800 pages, the two books represent a remarkable and wholly unique work that was praised by Art Speigelman for advancing the language of comics. But viewing the work through the additional lens of Ferris’ struggle also contextualizes the tremendous effort that informs the hard-earned message of the book: art has the power to heal.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book 2, continues the story as told through the personal notebook of Karen Reyes, a ten-year-old living in Chicago during the tumultuous year of 1968. This gothic romantic tale of Karen’s coming of age is layered with her understanding of herself as an artist, as a “good monster,” as a trangendered person. These transformations are uncovered through a generic detective story that drives the narrative: Karen is also on a dangerous quest to solve the murder of her neighbor, Anka, a holocaust survivor, while also discovering that her life in her uptown Chicago neighborhood is built on lies and violence.

Photo credit: Vadim Rubenstein, courtesy of Galerie Martel

The arrangement of the artworks in the gallery was notably symmetric. To the left, drawings of equal height showed the variety of visual techniques and forms borrowed from comic books and artist sketchbooks.  The selection on the right side of the gallery were portraits of the gothic characters who inhabit Karen’s imaginary and actual world. The focal point of the arrangement was Book Two’s enlarged cover placed in the center of the gallery:  a self-portrait of Karen as she sees herself as a monster. 

Emil Ferris’s original drawings of covers from My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two.

Being a monster in Ferris’s world is identified with physical differences, in particular the visually grotesque. In the book, Karen’s copies of covers of monster magazines are dark and ghastly, though she takes enormous pleasure in reading, collecting and sharing them.  The cover images hover between imaginary and real-life horror as they often foreshadow scenes in the story. The covers also provide the only structure to the books which otherwise contain no chapters or page numbers. They appear as monthly installments, so the passage of time is suggested through the device of the occasional cover issue date.

But being a monster is not always observable from the exterior, but rather through actions and motivations. The original pieces offer a closer appreciation of the variety of styles employed by Ferris, such as the fluid comic panels and word balloons that are reformatted to make a page spread, to drive the action of the story and demonstrate how the characters live. 

An original artwork (left) and the published version (right), from My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two. The monster on display is a supposedly religious man preaching the bible, while also abusing his followers, and keeping his secrets in his own notated version of the bible, which Karen reads.

 

Original artwork which appears as a double page spread in the published book.

Karen’s copies of fine art that she finds in books or during her cherished visits to the Art Institute of Chicago with her brother recall a form borrowed from the artist sketchbook.  Karen’s interpretations of works of art are the book’s most exquisite and surprising, and they demonstrate Ferris’ demanding and labor-intensive style. Working with basic materials, ball point pens and cheap spiral bound notebooks, Ferris uses the materials that Karen could afford, building rich textures and shadows from the smallest of cross hatches.

Original artwork from My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two featuring Karen’s rendering of Le Lit, 1892, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Ferris was so committed to the idea of creating Karen’s personal notebook that she originally worked on lined notebook paper but changed her process to working in layers to ease the labor of making corrections. The portraits featured in the exhibit demonstrate her use of layering, which add to the depth and complexity of each page, and by extension, the overall work.

Karen also copies many different artworks depicting the biblical story of Judith beheading Holofernes.  Judith is a daring and beautiful widow whose village has been invaded by the Holofernes army. She gains his trust through a sexual seduction, and then decapitates him to save her village.  Though Judith only appears in historical paintings, she’s featured on the character side of the gallery, because her story is so deeply pondered and brought to life by Karen’s imagination. In the published book, Karen reflects deeply the choice Judith made to use violence to save the people she loves and adds herself to the artwork as Judith’s loyal servant.

 

From left to right: Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 1665, Felice Ficherelli, Art Institute of Chicago; Emile Ferris’ original artwork; Published version in My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book 2. 

In a later segment of the Meet Emil Ferris documentary, Ferris highlights the importance of collage and synthesis to her artistic process:

   “I wanted to give a lot. I wanted to give everything I could. I could only choose certain things, so there’s a collaging that happens where I put two things together because one image has one energy but when you put it aside another image and then there’s text, it creates another sort of energy.”

 These layering and collaging choices are observed in the drawings of Franklin/Francoise, a school friend of Karen’s who was severely beaten for cross dressing, and a character she reads about in her monster magazines that looks like a younger version of Sylvia Gronan, Karen’s neighbor and the wife of a local mobster. The collision of texts and other images adds context to the characters.

Original artwork from My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two. Franklin/Francoise (left) and Sylvia Gronan (right). Their published versions are below

Original Portraits of Stan Silverberg (Anka’s widower), Diego (Karen’s brother) and Anka as a ghost.

 

The placement of the three portraits together allowed the exhibition the opportunity to show a compassionate side of Emil Ferris. Stan Silverberg is Anka’s widower rendered in blue, as is Anka’s ghost. Karen chose blue for Anka’s inner sadness that now her widower processes.  The center portrait shows Diego, who is committed to raising Karen as best as he can while also being involved with the local mob in order to avoid the draft for the Vietnam war. He’s one the books’ many flawed heroes.  In Karen’s portrait of Diego, she is responding to the advice of her friend who advises “when somebody is in a dark place the best thing you can do for them is to always try to remember their better, most beautiful selves.”

 My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book 2 offers no easy answers to the many questions and ideas it weaves together, so fittingly neither does it offer much in the way of a clear or conclusive ending. But the narrative, and everything it took to make it, demonstrates what Karen realizes in Book 2 that “the greatest way to be a strong, evil defeating monster is to make art and tell stories.”

Unless stated otherwise, all photos taken by Laurie Anne Agnese

Exhibit review: Tove Jansson: Paradise

 reviewed by Bart Beaty and Rebecca Sullivan, University of Calgary

Tove Jansson: Paradise. Heli Harni, curator. HAM Helsinki Art Museum, October 25, 2024 – April 6, 2025. https://www.hamhelsinki.fi/en/exhibitions/tove-jansson-paradise/

Photos are by the reviewers except for Bird Blue (detail) which is from the Museum's website.

It is all but impossible for visitors to Helsinki to avoid the influence of Tove Jansson. A Moomin shop occupies a prominent location in the airport, while two competing Moomin shops can be found in close proximity to the central train station. Moomin figures can be found in bakeries and candy shops and bookstores. The Moomins can be found peddling chocolate-filled peppermint candies, organic oat snacks, coffee mugs, cutting boards, can openers, stuffed toys, t-shirts, and wool socks. They are everywhere and they are on everything. Unsurprisingly, therefore, they were also in HAM Helsinki Art Museum.

From October 25, 2024 to April 6, 2025, the top two floors of Helsinki’s primary art space were given over to Tove Jansson: Paradise. Billed as an in-depth look at Jansson’s public paintings, the show included a large number of Jansson’s pre-Moomin paintings from the 1930s and 1940s while focusing extensively on her career as a muralist.

Jansson’s first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, was originally published in 1945 to no great success. Prior to that time, Jansson, the daughter of a sculptor father and an illustrator mother, spent most of the 1930s in a succession of art schools in Stockholm, Helsinki, and Paris. Following in the footsteps of her mother, she published illustrations in Garm, a Finnish-Swedish satirical magazine from 1929 to 1953 while, at the same time, exhibiting paintings in group shows. Jansson’s first solo painting exhibition took place in 1943, two years before the first Moomin book was published. Two years later, she painted her first mural at the Strömberg factory in Pitäjänmäki, Helsinki. Tove Jansson: Paradise is interested in combining all of these aspects of her career: the paintings from her student period through her early professionalization, her career as a muralist working in public spaces, and the early years and then rapid success of the Moomin books and comics.

Jansson’s first two solo shows were arranged by Leonard Bäcksbacka at his Konstalongen gallery 1943. The successful first show provided a boost for the young artist, but the second solo exhibition in 1946 was not well received by either critics or art patrons. The first several galleries of the exhibitions are given over to a selection of her paintings as well as the contemporaneous illustration work for Garm. Jansson’s paintings of this period are not immediately recognizable as the work of the Moomin author but demonstrate a strong influence of mid-century European modernism with their thick brushstrokes and moody palette, while the illustration work – often topical and political – shows stronger traces of the material that will develop in her children’s books.

Following the display of her early easel paintings, the final room on the first floor of the exhibition hosts two large frescoes as well as studies for the same. Commissioned in 1947 by the restaurant in the basement of the Helsinki City Hall, the two painting are titled Party in the Countryside and Party in the City. These works begin to synthesize Jansson’s modernist and folklorist aesthetics, providing a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of an artist determined to become a critical and commercial success.

Party in the Countryside depicts eight figures frolicking in lush vegetation. The images are cartoony in their representational simplicity and subtle pastel colour scheme - an abrupt departure from the tone and style of her paintings following the unsuccessful second show. The city scene is no less luxurious, depicting couples in gowns and evening wear dancing on a flower strewn balcony.

The two works, the artist’s first attempts at frescoes, participated in the massive post-war reconstruction effort across Finland that provided unprecedented opportunities for young artists. Jansson, who came from a well-connected family of artists, benefitted tremendously (one might even leave thinking overtly) from this social and political network.

The only public commission known to have been awarded to Jansson on a competitive basis was the Aurora Hospital murals intended for the new children’s ward. Alone among the murals on display, these clearly capitalized on her growing fame from the Moomin series. Play, painted in 1956, presented a series of Moomin characters in the stairwell and the EEG room of the hospital. It was later recreated at the Helsinki University Central Hospital when the pediatric ward was relocated in 1997. At HAM, the mural was recreated once again on the central staircase leading visitors from the first floor of the exhibition to the second.

The second floor of the exhibition was much more impressive than the first. A vast open space with vaulted ceilings broken up by temporary dividers, this floor showcased the immensity of the murals. Display cases of her sketches and highly detailed notebooks invited viewers to contemplate the artist’s process. Jansson typically produced preliminary sketches on paper and then worked through colour schemes on cardboard before concluding with a 1:1 charcoal tracing that would be transferred to the wall. Examples of each of these stages were on full display here (most impressively the enormous cartoon of The Ten Virgins with its pinpricks for the charcoal transfer readily apparent).

Bird Blue, 1953 (detail).
© Tove Jansson Estate.
Photo: HAM / Maija Toivanen.

            Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, Jansson produced public art for restaurants, hotels, several schools, the Nordic Union Bank and an altar piece for the Teuva Church in Southern Ostrobothnia. She worked in fresco, fresco-secco (pigment applied to dry plaster), watercolour on glass, and oil on canvas. Over time, these works increasingly came to resemble work for which she is best known, and even to incorporate elements of the Moomin universe at the margins.

As Canadians of a certain generation most of the waves of Moomin-mania missed us, so we have no sentimental attachment to Jansson’s work. This turned out to be a benefit as the exhibition is not about the Moomins really but about the artist behind the phenomenon. There was no hiding Jansson’s sexuality, her sometimes craven ambition, and her canny working of her socially powerful contacts in both government and the art world. While Moomin die-hards might come away mildly disappointed, the casual visitor gained incredible insight into mid-twentieth-century Finland as it sought to distance itself from its complex wartime status into an independent nation with its own distinct visual culture. And, for those die-hards, there are Moomin mugs and mittens in the bookshop.

Sketch for the Bird Blue mural, 1953. Commision for the canteen at
Kila Swedish-language elementary school (today Karjaa co-educational school). 

Exhibit Review: Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing (2024) at American University Museum

 by Mike Rhode

fig. 1 self-portrait

Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing. Sadie Williams (Ralph Steadman Art Collection director) and Andrea Lee Harris (exhibition coordinator). Washington, DC: American University Museum at the Katzen. September 7 – December 8, 2024. https://www.american.edu/cas/museum/2024/and-another-thing-steadman.cfm

Ralph Steadman (fig. 1) is a British cartoonist and illustrator who has been active since the late 1950s but broke through in America with his collaborations with Hunter Thompson for Rolling Stone magazine in the early 1970s. He is a trenchant and engaged observer of politics, but also illustrates classic books and alcoholic beverage labels. His distinctive style, augmented with watercolor splotches, is immediately recognizable to those who know his work. One pleasure of this exhibit is seeing earlier works, before that style solidified. When he begins working in color regularly on a large scale, his artwork is amazing, and it is fascinating to see originals of material usually meant for smaller illustration reproductions.

This exhibit was conceived as a follow-up to 2018’s successful Ralph Steadman: A Retrospective (see https://www.american.edu/cas/museum/2018/ralph-steadman-retrospective.cfm ). The first exhibit was curated by London’s Cartoon Museum’s Anita O'Brien. This one is curated by Steadman’s daughter, Williams, and Harris, a professional exhibit designer. Steven Heller[i] asked about the creation of this exhibit which included “149 artworks and memorabilia,”

Heller: Sadie, as co-curator and also Ralph’s daughter, how did this exhibition come together?

Williams: Between 2016 and 2019 we were touring a retrospective of 110 original artworks to venues in the USA, including the Society of Illustrator in New York and the Jordan Schnitzer Art Museum in Eugene, OR. It was incredibly well-received, but in 2020 the pandemic meant we had to cancel the last two venues. That exhibition was sponsored by United Therapeutics because their incredible CEO, Martine Rothblatt, is a fan and has become a friend over the years.

Early in 2023, Martine said she would like to see a new exhibition put together and that, once again, United Therapeutics would sponsor it. It was great to assemble the team again including co-ordinator Andrea Harris (she’s a force of nature), and start booking in venues. It is so special to launch it at the AU [American University] Museum, where we had such an amazing reception in 2017, and also get the Bates College Museum of Art in Maine into the schedule, as that was one of the venues we had to cancel.

 I recommend reading the rest of the interview to understand more of the thinking that went into this exhibit. As with the earlier show, an excellent catalogue is available https://www.ralphsteadmanshop.com/products/and-another-thing-catalogue-soft-case

fig. 2

fig. 3

 To reach the exhibit on the upper third floor of the museum, one either takes an extremely long set of stairs (they run the entire length of museum), or a nondescript elevator. This is not a metaphor, but it does point out a couple of problems with this otherwise excellent exhibit. The Katzen building, of which the museum is a small part of acting as an endcap at an entrance to the campus, is a brutalist concrete building that is really designed for large pieces of modern art, and not for a paper art show. The walls are curved and very high and the building is starkly white. If you brave the steps, which I believe is the intended way to approach it, at the top you were greeted with five pieces (three are clearly labelled reproductions) from Steadman's most famous collaboration, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas (fig. 2). A small caricature sculpture of Hunter Thompson was also displayed here and appeared out of place… so much so that I paid no attention to it, but literally as I was writing this review, an edition of 25 reproductions of it went on sale for £975 each.  (fig. 3)

 

fig. 4

However, if you take the elevator, you come out and what appears to be the back of the exhibit, facing Steadman’s student and early work (fig. 4). The other problem illuminated by either of these approaches is that none of the artwork’s groupings was labeled and it was left to the viewer to deduce where they might fit in his career. The building complicates this because there are no clear demarcation lines and very few walls. If you did go up the steps and see the five pieces at the top, you then had to turn about 60° to your left to actually enter the exhibit. (fig. 5) 

fig. 5

 

And then you’re faced with a choice. There were walls to either side of you, as well as a right-angled temporary wall in front of you. If you're an American who’s old enough to drive, do you head to the wall on your right? Or do you follow the wall on your left because you’re standing closest to it?  Or do you go up the middle to the two painted temporary walls?  If you chose to follow the driving conventions, you ended up at a part of the exhibit (fig. 6) that covers Steadman’s children's books, as well as other books such as Animal Farm and Alice in Wonderland, (fig. 6a) and his work with journalist Will Self. Several of these children's books on the long, curved wall and the temporary wall facing it, such as Little Prince and the Tiger Cat (1967), are done in styles at one would not have normally recognized as his work ((fig. 6b, fig. 6c).

 

 

 

fig. 6

fig. 6a

 

 

 

fig. 6b

fig. 6c

 If you went along the other wall (fig. 7), you saw book illustrations for Treasure Island, Fahrenheit 451, The Curse of Lono, and I, Leonardo. The color artwork was absolutely enthralling especially on projects he obviously loved such as the Leonardo book. This section then included more Will Self collaborations, and then an exhibit statement from the curators (fig. 8e). This statement should have been placed both at the main entrance by the stairs, and on the wall by the elevator. As it was, it was in the middle of the exhibit in about as nondescript spot as could have been chosen.

(fig. 7)

 

fig. 7a

 In the middle, between the two book sections, on blue-painted temporary walls (fig. 8) was political material. One wall was caricatures of American presidents (and John McCain) (fig. 8a) while the other contained issues that caught Steadman’s attention such as famine in Africa or American aggression (figs. 8b-d). The people I saw the exhibit with, experts on other types of comics, were particularly unhappy with the lack of labelling of the subjects, which have faded in memory as political cartoons or caricatures frequently do.

 

 

(fig. 8)

 

 

fig. 8a

 

fig. 8b

fig. 8c

fig. 8d

fig. 8e - Exhibit statement

 As noted, on the other side of one of the temporary walls were children's book illustrations (fig 6c), while on the reverse of the American president’s section was early commercial material. Most appears to be from fairly early in Steadman’s career when he was working with Private Eye magazine (fig. 9) and doing far more work in straight black and white, without the colored ink spots and splotches he would become known for. If he had continued in this style, my personal feeling is that he would be far less known and appreciated than he is today. Facing this temporary wall were portraits or caricatures commonly of British subjects (figs. 10, 11), that blended into other commercial work and ended with his recent work for the Flying Dog Brewery (fig. 12). An exhibit case at the end of this section shows off many of the commercial pieces he's done as well as some tools of his trade such as photographic references, 1970s newsprint editions of Rolling Stone, a horse racing sporting magazine, a Breaking Bad Blu-ray cover, and the like (fig. 13). He has had a long career and continually re-invented himself (there are two NFTs in the show but they are repurposed from existing art, fig. 14), but at his heart, Steadman is always a commercial illustrator.

fig. 9 Private Eye pages

fig. 10

fig. 11

fig. 12 beer label

fig. 13

fig. 14 - Trough of Disillusionment NFT

 The rest of the exhibit is in what, on a different floor, is a separate room. On this level, it is not walled off, yet functions as a distinct space. As noted, if you exited the elevator here, you would see Steadman’s early work including samples clipped from newspapers of his Teeny pocket comic (aka comic panel) and school drawings including dinosaurs in a museum. The two anatomical drawings are highlighted as being the beginning of a theme that runs through his works to the current day. One cartoon in particular is shown twice as it shows how he decided to stop using a typical British non-de-plume of Stead, in favor of signing his full name. (figs. 15-18)

fig. 15 Teeny pocket comics

 

fig. 16

fig. 17

fig. 18

 There was also an exhibit case in the side area with other tools of his trade -- lots of pens and material from his archives -- as well as three pieces of jewelry which, as befits a commercial artist, will be for sale in a new venture that he has arranged with the jewelry maker. (fig. 19) The final corner nook of the exhibit features some of his environmental work done in collaboration with Ceri Levy on endangered or extinct (but also non-existent) birds and mammals. (fig. 20) “Paranoids,” a very small selection of manually manipulated Polaroid prints (fig. 21) showed an interesting experiment that probably had no real future or practical application, but was remarked upon by some viewers when I walked past. There was also a very long shelf, a pre-existing feature of the building’s architecture that overlooks the atrium/stairway, that has an example of about 15 or 20 of the variety of books he's worked on over his career. (figs. 22-24)

fig. 19

 

fig. 20

fig. 21

  

fig. 22

fig. 23

fig. 24

fig. 25 - overview facing backward into the main exhibit

fig. 26 - Thompson statue

The exhibit, with a wealth of original art, was marvelous, but would have benefited from a firmer hand curating it (or perhaps one less personally embedded in his life) and better labeling. Frequently the viewer was left to deduce what part of Steadman’s career one was viewing, and how important that particular art work/style was to his whole career. If one read all the individual object labels, you would have a good overview of his career, but that is a very demanding way to see an exhibit. Actively working to bookend the previous exhibit also meant curatorial choices were made that might have benefited from additional labels or text. In the Heller interview, Williams said, “Anita O’Brien did such an amazing job with the original exhibition that I used that as a template. I am quite practical in these things, and I find having something visual to work with very helpful. I literally took one of the old catalogues from the last exhibition and replaced like with like, sticking in print-outs of pieces to replace the existing ones with. Then I pulled in a few additional pieces to bulk out some areas, like the writers, and the presidents of the United States.” In some ways, the exhibit probably catered too much to those with pre-existing knowledge of Steadman’s art and career. Since so much of his work is commercial illustration, more explanations of the original art on display versus the final product of a book, or advertisement, or magazine illustration would have been useful. However, this was an exhibit of excellent art by a long-standing master cartoonist and illustrator, and it was a true pleasure to see these treasures of original art. The fact that there is a catalogue for the show is a significant added benefit. I for one would be pleased to see this exhibit duology turn into a trilogy.

Published concurrently on ComicsDC and IJOCA blogs.

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[i] Heller, Steven. 2024. “’Serial Polluter’ Ralph Steadman Gets the Last Laugh,” The Daily Heller (October 2): https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/the-daily-heller-ralph-steadman-exhibition/ . Also worth reading is “Ralph Steadman on Art, Poetry, and Hunter S. Thompson's Mean Streak,” Rolling Stone (August 25, 2024): https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-pictures/ralph-steadman-illustrations-hunter-thomson-art-1235084502/george-orwell/