Doris Slater Titus: The Bathwater Menagerie (original) (raw)
2021, Doris Slater Titus - Retrospective, 1941-1964
Doris Mildred Titus (nee Slater) was born outside Chatham, Ontario in 1917. She attended the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) on scholarship and focused on commercial art, later graduating in 1939. In 1941, she began illustrating comic books for Anglo-American Publications. The drawings for her first comic, “Penny’s Diary,” made her the first woman comic book artist in Canada. In 1954, Titus moved to Brantford, Ontario and was hired as an art teacher at Brantford Collegiate Institute. During this time, she founded the Sketch Club at Glenhyrst Gardens (now Glenhyrst Art Gallery), participated in exhibitions, and befriended artist Toni Onley. Her experiments with abstract painting led to the use of unconventional mediums like her own bathwater. Titus left Brantford for Ottawa in 1960 to teach at the Ottawa High School of Commerce. Tragically, she died in an automobile accident in June, 1964 at the age of 47. For her contributions to the Canadian comic book industry, she was inducted into the Shuster Awards Hall of Fame for Canadian comic book creators in 2015. Her work resides in several private collections in Canada and England, and in the permanent collection of Glenhyrst Art Gallery.
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A Review of Hillary Chute's Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics
Over the past few years, Hillary Chute has become one of the best-known authors of academic articles on “graphic narratives” (a term she rightfully prefers to the famous misnomer, “graphic novel,” as first pointed out in the special issue of Modern Fiction Studies she co-edited with Marianne DeKoven in 2006). Graphic Women is her first collection of essays on the topic. Her volume is most welcome, as there are currently very few studies on the prolific but little-discussed production of contemporary comics by women. It is a book written with enthusiasm, clarity and the ability to condense an obviously exhaustive body of literature that the author has gone through and considered before putting pen to paper.
Women have always been in comics. They have been artists, colourers, inkers, and letterers. They have been editors and publishers, like Jenette Kahn, who initiated the “DC Explosion” during her reign, reinventing classic characters like Superman in the 1980s and encouraging DC Comics to push new boundaries in subject matter under her leadership, or Peggy Burns, who champions the feminist workplace at Drawn & Quarterly. And, as I will demonstrate, women have been auteurs and creators since the very beginning of print comics, innovating and influencing the early development of the medium, even though their work has often been consigned to obscurity in public memory, or erased from conventional accounts of comics history as an exclusively male preserve. In what follows, I explore examples of comics created, scripted and drawn by women.
Comics and Graphic Novels by Women
2009
This is an annotated bibliography that I put together for my collection of comics and comics ephemera by women, as part of my submission to MSU Library's Book Collection Competition. My collection won first prize that year, and since then my collection has only grown...
Before the Babe and After: Counting Women Cartoonists in the Underground Comix
Source: Notes in the History of Art, 2020
This year we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of a remarkable publication, It Ain't Me Babe, proclaimed by its creators as "the first women's liberation comic" and "the world's first all-women's comic book." 1 Bearing the date July 1970, this was the collaborative product of seven female artists already active in the alternative feminist media and counterculture newspapers of the San Francisco Bay Area. 2 Several of them belonged to a group called the Feminist Liberation Basement Press, which produced a tabloid newspaper that bore the same title as the comic book. 3 It Ain't Me Babe resembled in format the other underground "comix" sold in head shops, record stores, and independent booksellers source: notes in the history of art. fall 2020.
CAN DO: Photographs and other material from the Women's Art Library Magazine Archive
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Curated by Mo Throp and Maria Walsh, this collection of mainly black and white photographs from the Women’s Art Library Magazine archive has rarely been seen outside the confines of its black boxes in the Special Collections at Goldsmiths University library. The photographs are one of the material remains of a dynamic independent art publication dedicated to the debates and documentation of women’s art from 1983 to 2002. The magazine began life in 1983 as the Women Artists Slide Library Newsletter, acquiring, over the course of its 20-year run, the titles: Women Artists Slide Library Journal (1986); Women's Art Magazine (1990); and make: the magazine of women’s art (1996). Artists submitted photographs of their work for publication, some images were printed in the magazine, most were not, but all were carefully stored in the library stacks at Goldsmiths where the curators were (re)introduced to them by Althea Greenan, curator of the Women's Art Library in Special Collections...
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