OOPS PLEASE NOTE THIS HAS BEEN MOVED TO THE 9th!

First Thursday at the Cartoon Art Museum:
Vanessa Davis Reception

Thursday, August 9, 2007
5:00 – 8:00pm

Free and open to the public

The Cartoon Art Museum is pleased to host a reception for its current Small Press Spotlight artist, Vanessa Davis, on Thursday, August 2, from 5:00 to 8:00pm. This reception is free and open to the public.

Vanessa Davis is the creator of Spaniel Rage, a diary comic chronicling her toils and triumphs as a young woman in New York City. A recent transplant to the West Coast, Davis was born and raised in West Palm Beach, Florida. She grew up devouring Archie comics, but turned to performance art and feminist-themed sculpture while attending an arts magnet school. In college, she rediscovered her love of comics while studying painting and textile design.

After moving to New York and working as an editor at the American Folk Art Museum, Davis began drawing comics. Inspired by an old painting exercise of producing one small painting a day, she began drawing and self-publishing a daily diary comic. Davis fell in love with the rich and vibrant comics scene in New York, growing obsessed with comics as she discovered the stories and art around her.

Davis’s self-published mini-comics and anthology stories are collected in Spaniel Rage, a book published by Buenaventura Press in 2005. She has also contributed to several anthologies, including Kramers Ergot, Papercutter and Scheherazade. Her comics and illustration have been printed in Arthur Magazine, Drama, The New York Times, Jane and Vice magazine.

Davis now lives in Santa Rosa, California. She works part-time as an administrative assistant at Santa Rosa Junior College while doing freelance illustration and working on an upcoming book of short comics to be published by Drawn and Quarterly.

About the Small Press Spotlight:

San Francisco has been a hotbed of innovative, groundbreaking comic art since the late 1800s with the advent of the modern comic strip. In the1960s, the Bay Area gained further notoriety when the underground comix movement launched from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. Today, some of the biggest names in alternative and small-press comics hail from the Bay Area, and the Cartoon Art Museum’s Small Press Spotlight focuses on the works of these talented individuals.