200705041038Actual animators come out and show their stuff at 2A4TV2 (LEFT, Jason DiOrio):

Second Annual Exhibition for New York’s Animation Industry
Opening reception – Friday, May 4th, 7pm-10pm
May 4th through May 25th, 2007
Stay Gold Gallery

Stay Gold Gallery is pleased to present Too Art for TV, Too, the Second Annual Exhibition for New York’s Animation Industry. 35 artists, by way of toys, comics, prints, and paintings, liberate the skills otherwise “owned” by their television networks bosses.

In January of 2006, “Too Art for TV” opened as the first of this annual event. Drawing in an excited, elbow-to-elbow crowd of artists, illustrators, filmmakers, animators, and gallery goers, “Too Art for TV” unquestionably demonstrated the wide spread appeal of animation inspired art.

Animation is terrific at inspiring both audience and artist alike. Its influence starts early; Saturday morning cartoons fill our heads with colorful shapes and silly premises, the ever-complex process shielded by a convincing final product. Born of countless drawings and paintings, an animated anything is a large artistic effort; both abstract in its construction and real in its effect on our imagination.


The Village Voice, examining last year’s “Too Art for TV” wrote; “Underpinning the cacophonous chaos of today’s 24/7 cartoon broadcasts is an army of artists skilled in depicting the human figure” [R.C. Baker]. Such a genre is bound to draw purveyors of art, as evidenced by MoMA’s Pixar exhibit last year, and this year’s recent “Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making”.

Animation artists are experts in monsters, robots, villains, and the changing genres of pop influence. They are the lusty consumers of graphic novels, toys, video games, art books, and the many incarnations of obsessive geek culture. Their careers make them excellent drafts-people, skilled at drawing and well adapted to the latest design technologies. Loaded with influences and abilities, their works when combined create an umbrella movement for pop surrealism, geek-core, graffiti, low-brow and the finer arts.

Too Art for TV, Too is the biggest showing of this movement to date; featuring the artists who create, write, direct, storyboard, design, color, and animate “Venture Bros.” (Adult Swim), “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” (Fox Network), “Ice Age” (Blue Sky Studios), “A Scanner Darkly” (Richard Linklater), “SpongeBob SquarePants” (Nickelodeon), “Code Name: Kids Next Door” (Cartoon Network), “Stanley” (Disney TV), “Daria” (MTV Animation), “Blue’s Clues” (Nick JR), and more.

Senior Curator: Liz Artinian, Co-Curators: Amanda Baehr Fuller and Jessica Milazzo

1 COMMENT

  1. Jason Diorio is giant slimy weasel!!! What a hack! He has been stealing art from talented artist at Nickelodeon studio in Burbank, California!!!

  2. YES HE IS A THIEF. The image you have up of the skeleton monkey is not his creation as is most of the work he claims to have made!!! It was created by artists at Nickelodeon in Burbank

  3. The artwork above is a painting by artist Bill Dely. I’ve know Bill for 14 years, and actually watched him working on this painting in progress. What a shame to claim someone elses hard work as your own. Bill and I both have had people steal our work in the past from time to time, but people always get caught.

    -LDW