Resplendent: Identity & Visibility in Comics features the work of comic and visual artists who rewrite and reimagine how gender and identity can be represented in contemporary comics. Mainstream comics have long been dominated by white, largely male superheroes and villains. This exhibition highlights the growing body of positive, powerful, and diverse depictions of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC+ characters and story worlds. It features regional and national practitioners who bring fresh voices and new perspectives to their medium.
Comics offer a powerful platform for LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC+ artists to envision themselves. Drawing conceptual and visual connections to acts of line-making, the exhibition explores the medium of comics as a means to delineate new spaces of belonging. Lines are elemental to the act of drawing and a defining visual feature of many comic forms. Actual and symbolic lines are also drawn, crossed, and joined together, presenting opportunities for self-assertion and self-identification. Such ideas are present in the writings of the cultural theorist, Sara Ahmed, who proposes that lines both divide things and construct spaces that we imagine we can be in. The curator and author, Justin Hall, uses the metaphor of the line in his anthology, No Straight Lines, to alert our attention to the increasing number of queer comic artists who are creating outside of the lines of popular comic genres.
Resplendent: Identity & Visibility in Comics highlights a selection of the many comic artists who use words and images to explore the politics of identity and to express ideas of beauty, joy, and abundance. From graphic memoirs, serialized strips, and web comics to fantastical stories and commanding autobiographical narratives, the exhibition brings together a wide range of themes and media that celebrate the imaginary and private lives of their creators.
Lawrence Lindell, Breena Nuñez, and A.K. Summers draw intimate personal stories that are powerful, poignant, and sometimes humorous accounts of real life. The comics and comics-inspired work of Chitra Ganesh, Rumi Hara, and Bishakh Som conjure sumptuous and dream-like imagery to articulate the intersections of cultural and gender identity.
The complexities of queer love and friendship are taken up in the comics of Paige Braddock, Jennifer Camper, and Jessica Campbell. Raúl the Third also explores themes of friendship through the adventures of an eclectic group of LatinX characters, while collaborators Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith’s slice of life comics pay tribute to the beauty of and relationships between Black women.
Lavaughan Jenkins and Karmimadeebora McMillan, both painters, create comics as part of their larger creative practice and as a platform to address racial identity and systemic racism.
And the work of interdisciplinary artists Edie Fake and Lilli Carré focus on transformations of the physical body. Fake’s comics are surreal explorations of non-binary bodies and sexual experiences. Carré’s animation examines the malleable female body represented throughout history.
Resplendent: Identity and Visibility in Comics is curated by Lynne Cooney, Ph.D., Director of Exhibitions and Galleries at Montserrat College of Art.