Stories come in many different forms, giving life to new ideas and fostering communities of visionaries. In conjunction with StoryFest 2024, The Westport Library will be showcasing two art mediums that have created such narratives.
The history, present, and future of cartooning and an album cover art retrospective headline the three new exhibits running from September 7 to December 10 in the Library’s Sheffer, South, and Jesup Galleries.
Celebrate the colorful history of cartooning in Fairfield County with Cartoon County: The Golden Age of Cartooning in Connecticut in the Sheffer Gallery and explore the medium’s current condition and its vision for the future with The State of Cartooning in the South Gallery. Curated by cartoonist and comics historian Brian Walker with help from the Library’s Exhibit Curator Carole Erger-Fass, these exhibits bring together working cartoonists and cartoon historians for an in-depth exploration of the genre.
An opening reception and accompanying keynote presentation by Walker will be held at the Library Tuesday, September 10, from 6 to 8 pm.
Cartoon County: The Golden Age of Cartooning in Connecticut will display works from The Westport Public Art Collections (WestPAC), featuring more than 40 original cartoons by some of the area’s greats, including Dik Browne, Mel Casson, Stan Drake, John Cullen Murphy, Leonard Starr, Jack Tippit, and Mort Walker — whose graphics on the gallery’s walls derive from Walker’s 1980 book The Lexicon of Comicana, which will be reissued by New York Review Books in 2025.
Cullen Murphy, author and son of the cartoonist behind Prince Valiant and Big Ben Bolt, refers to the history of cartooning in Connecticut with fondness.
“For a period of about 50 years, right in the middle of the American Century, many of the nation’s top comic strip cartoonists, gag cartoonists, and magazine illustrators lived within a stone’s throw of one another in the southwestern corner of Connecticut,” he wrote in Cartoon County, “a bit of bohemia amid those men in their gray flannel suits.”
The State of Cartooning will display works by active members of the Connecticut Chapter of the National Cartoonists Society, including Greg, Brian, and Neal Walker, who carry the legacy of their father, Mort Walker, the creator of Beetle Bailey. Other featured artists include Ray Billingsley, Bob Englehart, Bill Janocha, Sean Kelly, Maria Scrivan, and more.
As it did in the spring, which featured an exhibit of cover art from selected jazz albums, the Jesup Gallery exhibit will focus on country music this fall. Drawn once more from the collection of American blues keyboardist and record producer Mark Naftalin and his wife, Ellen Naftalin, Art of the Album: Country will showcase the art of country music, with album covers dating from the 1920s through the 1970s.
