Exhibition in photos: Barbara Dale Retrospective in Baltimore

 Barbara Dale Retrospective. Jeffrey Kent (cur.). Baltimore: Peale Museum. June 15-August 6, 2023. https://www.thepeale.org/exhibition-barbara-dale-retrospective/

Since I know the artist, this is not a review, but rather a description of the exhibit. - Mike Rhode

The Peale Museum is in a classical 3-story building close to Baltimore’s city hall, and the exhibit fills three rooms on the second floor. As you enter the building, you see the steps have been decorated so the risers show Dale’s COVID-era project of painting / decorating / illustrating an empty roll of toilet paper per day.  Towards one side of the steps is the curator’s statement, which begins,

Stepping into Baltimore-based cartoonist Barbara Dale’s studio, Peale chief curator Jeffrey Kent was truly awed by the experience as he witnessed Barbara’s effortless utilization of various mediums in her creative practice, including pastel chalk, lithographs, ceramics, paint, pencil, ink, etc., etc., etc..

Barbara Dale’s artistic journey began with a modest inheritance of $500 from her grandfather. With this seed money, she ventured into the world of printing and created Dale Cards in 1979—a line of alternative greeting cards known for their wit and edginess.

Dale firmly holds the belief that commercial art is just as valuable as fine art, considering both to be equally significant creative practices without a clear distinction between them. In this exhibition, you will encounter ten thought-provoking themes, each approached in a unique manner that is sure to ignite meaningful conversations and provoke laughter. With her unparalleled perspective, Barbara explores a wide range of topics, including women’s issues, the fragility of life and the life cycle, food and sex, commentary on art itself, character-driven narratives and relationships, self-portraits, the juxtaposition of objects, political and social justice commentary, the exploration of reality versus illusion, and the similarities between commercial and fine art.

Kent’s layout of the exhibit reflects this. A small hallway links the rooms, and on one side has an exhibit illustration done by Dale while the other wall is artwork with found images of hands and a label asks “What is Real & What Isn’t?” The largest room is full of Dale’s recent work – self-portraits, COVID response art (including over 200 toilet paper rolls repurposed into art and displayed in one long row and a monitor playing a news story about them), women’s rights material (including an older large lithograph detailing the circumstances of her marriage in divorce in a silent comic strip), large ceramic vessels (almost amphora) painted to look like women’s bodies, and an older set of maternity mugs that depicted a stylized pregnant woman’s abdomen.

The second largest room displays Dale’s commercial work including the greeting cards and calendars which made her one of the most successful women cartoonists of the late 20^th century. Viewers of a certain age will recognize Dale’s working women character. Dale’s penchant for sexual humor is on display in this room, in the greeting cards but also in a section of paintings labelled Food & Sex. Other paintings are of Characters, and there is a significant amount of her work with found objects, including old photographs, cardboard rolls and packing material, and junk mail. Three pieces in this section show how successful the greeting card line was with one ad noting, “75,000,000 sold so far!” Dale’s comic strip, The Stanley Family, is also highlighted.

The final small room consists of Dale’s charity work, reflected in stories in Parade and Life magazines, and her recent anti-Trump artwork. Throughout the entire exhibit are quotes from Dale’s peers as well as excerpts from a recent article “’Working Woman’: Barbara Dale, Cartoonist and Fine Artist,” by former Library of Congress curator Martha H. Kennedy, Persimmon Tree (Summer 2023): https://persimmontree.org/summer-2023/working-woman/

The exhibit is free to visit, but donations are requested.

With her permission, the following photographs give a very complete overview of the exhibit.

 

 

  

 

Hallway:

 

 

 

Largest room of self-portaits, COVID-era works, and ceramics: 

 

 

The toilet paper roll COVID project:

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Wayne Nicolette, from Xibitz demonstrating mounting of toilet paper roll art

Dale and cartoonist Mike Jenkins

The second room:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Third room:

Not All Heroes Need Museums: Brussels’ Marc Sleen Museum Closes

Photos by Mike Rhode, January 2019

by Wim Lockefeer

Somewhere in the 70s, when people all over the world started seeing comics as something more than "just for kids," early cognoscenti of comics in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) decided that their region's own comics tradition needed recognition on its own (as opposed to the generally more-accepted Franco-Belgian school, which was largely francophone in origin.).

Typically, Flemish comics were newspaper-based, serialized stories in a comedic style, and its founding fathers were Willy Vandersteen, the creator of Suske & Wiske, Marc Sleen, one-time Guinness World Record holder for most prolific cartoonist, and Bob De Moor (even though he predominantly worked for the Studios Hergé). Later, the Pantheon was expanded with people like Jef Nys (Jommeke), Robert Merhottein (Kiekeboe) and Hec Leemans (Bakelandt and De Kampioenen, the current best-selling comic in Flanders).

Of the three, Vandersteen and Sleen were real cultural giants, well-known by even the most casual comics reader, regulars in the mainstream media, and bestowed with all kind of honorary titles. And both wanted to continue their legacy with a museum. Vandersteen's studio was transformed in an experience museum for kids, and in 2009 Sleen's own museum opened in the Rue des Sables in Brussels, across the street from the famous Belgian Comics Centre.

Stallaert dedicace in book in the giftshop

By then, Sleen had already concluded his longest-running series (Nero, in 2002), a decade after he had delegated the artwork for the comic to collaborator Dirk Stallaert, limiting his own contribution to scripting the actual stories. It must be said, by then Nero (and Sleen) already was a bit of a faded glory, cherished by an older, nostalgic audience, but without much of the social and cultural relevance it used to have.

The reason for this was that Sleen's stories were typical newspaper strips, realized without too much of a plan or script, and loaded with topical references. The stories were highly entertaining, often very funny romps with a lot of smashing and running, but also with keen social and political satire and criticism. Published as albums, though, they seldom aged well, as the references often faded with the times.

Additionally, while Vandersteen did create a readership for himself in the French-speaking part of the country, attempts to introduce Nero to his francophone compatriots proved more difficult, and the series was halted in 1987.

It's hardly a surprise that the Marc Sleen Museum never really got off the ground.  Since its opening, it was never able to welcome the expected number of 25,000 visitors, and it was hardly able to break even. Support by the Brussels government (200,000 euros annually) kept the organization afloat for a while (even though much of the money was used for an artist-in-residence program) until it was announced that that would end by 2022, when Sleen's centennial would be celebrated throughout the year. The Museum itself closed to the general public on May 31, 2023.

The old Le Peuple building that used to house the Museum, will remain the property of the Marc Sleen Foundation, and his (recreated) studio will remain open to the public, albeit only upon request. Starting in the summer of 2023, the Comics Museum will rent most of the rooms for specific exhibitions and events, specifically focusing on the introduction of new comics talent. 

 

As is the case with the building, the objects that were part of the Museum's main exhibition remain with the Marc Sleen Foundation.

At the moment of writing, the website for the Museum at https://www.marcsleen.be/ reads as a 2022 time capsule. A virtual tour of the Museum can be seen at https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=e3wMeeHrPpm The still-extant Suske en Wiske Museum’s website is https://www.suskeenwiskemuseum.be/