One of my all-time favorite artists, Phoebe Gloeckner, will be at the Michigan Theater tomorrow as part of the Penny W. Stamps Distiguished Visitor Series. You should all go! Info here. I can guarantee it will be fascinating, as Phoebe is quirky, intelligent, kind of crazy and often controversial.I first became a fan of Phoebe's work when my professor, Holly Hughes, suggested that I might like Phoebe's part-novel, part graphic novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl. It immediately became one of my favorite books ever, and has since then been adapted for stage.
The year after I read that book, Phoebe was hired to be professor at my school, the U of M School of Art & Design. During our senior year, my friend Cristina and I both worked as assistants to Phoebe for our work-study program. What started out as a job creating a digital catalog of her vast comics collection eventually turned into us sewing tiny little pairs of jeans and beat-up looking shirts for the dolls for the Ciudad Juarez project that it looks like Phoebe will be speaking about tomorrow.
We also modeled for a lot of eye and mouth photos. From the photo above it is kind of hard to tell, but the dolls have real human eyes and mouths Photoshopped onto their faces. I don't think my blue eyes and lip ring probably made it into the final images - my appearance is about as un-authentically Mexican as it gets, but I'm pretty sure Cristina is in there.Phoebe's work about Ciudad Juarez is also part of the I Live Here project, which you can read about here.
I am sure the lecture tomorrow will be awesome and I'm happy to be able to share a little about one of my favorite artists.
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