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 In a time of such uncertainties, we know one thing for sure; we have an amazingly talented and generous crew of Teaching Artists here at DACO. Our own Barbara Ery, who leads the Women in Recovery group at DACO, created this colorful collage project for children of all ages. Show us your collages on social media and use #DACOatHome. Click here to check it out.
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 DACO Teaching Artist Barbara Ery walks us through how to sew a cloth mask at home in two short videos. Make your masks and then share your creations with us using #DACOatHome. Stay healthy and stay creative! Check out the videos here.
Supplies: Two pieces of fabric (6” x 9”) Scissors Two pieces of elastic 7” Sewing machine Matching thread Iron Instructions: Sew right sides of together. Leave 5” on long side. When sewing corners double stitch. Our elastic inside at corners (make sure just sew in corner). Trim corners. When done sewing flip inside out. Push out corners. Iron. Top stitch. Can make a few pleats by folding over and stitching over. Let the wonders and beauty of Spring be your muse for this Wednesday Watercolor lesson from Lisa Schorr. Create your own painting by following the steps Lisa outlines in her lesson here. Be sure to share your work with us on social media and use #DACOatHome! Happy painting! Check out the lesson here.  To our Wednesday Watercolor crew, this one's for you! Teaching Artist Lisa Schorr brings you her lesson on painting a beautiful forest. Check out the lesson here, and make sure you share your work on social media and use #DACOatHome!  While you can't come to us, we will come to you! Today, Teaching Artist Lisa Schorr brings us an art lesson on how to create your own eggshell mosaic. Check it out here! Don't forget to share pics of your creations, tag us on social media and use #DACOatHome!   Greetings!
As we shift into slightly warmer weather and slightly more daylight, it’s a great time to visit the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio! Our current exhibition, Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund continues to engage visitors who are spending more and more time in the galleries. We were pleased to welcome more than 30 participants to Nate Beeler’s Chalk Talk program recently. Mark your calendar for Dr. Judith Yaross Lee’s discussion of the The Humor of the New Yorker Magazine on March 29, and for a visit from Barbara’s Shermund’s niece, Amanda Gormley, as she helps us Discover Barbara Shermund on April 19. You, too, can learn to illustrate at the Creating Comic Books classes or at the One-Panel Cartooning class. Register today while spots still remain. We’ve got great programming, on-going and new classes and camps set for our next exhibit, 2 + 3 x 18: Diptychs and Triptychs by 18 Contemporary Ohio Artists, running May 16 to August 16. We’re very grateful for the generosity of the Fox Foundation for sponsoring our current exhibition, and we’re grateful for our members who support our daily operations. Join DACO here, by phone or in-person, and enjoy member benefits immediately. We’re always welcoming new volunteers to greet, work in the Museum Shop, or to docent. And we’re looking for some community family support to sponsor the Russian Decorative Arts from the Czars to the USSR exhibition in the fall; let us know if you’d like to participate! Stay up-to-date daily by following us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Artfully yours, David Hogrefe Executive Director  Anna Vigorito teaches “Creating Comic Books” at DACO beginning March 15. Through a watercolor class she took at the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio, Anna Vigorito learned many crucial techniques and fundamentals that helped her hone her craft. Vigorito went on to work as an illustrator for LookHUMAN, and for the past three years, has worked on a weekly webcomic inspired by the Legend of Zelda series. Now, the student has become the teacher, bringing her love for visual storytelling to DACO through a “Creating Comic Books” course for junior-high and high-school students that begins March 15. We spoke with Vigorito about some of her most memorable work and why she says southeast Ohio is the perfect place to nurture the talent of illustrators. What drew you to the world of art and design, and specifically as a cartoonist? It was the ability to create on the go and bring your ideas to fruition. I always loved fantasy creatures, so I believed the easiest way to bring them to life was through drawing and storytelling. Comics and animation are the perfect marriage of storytelling and drawing. What have been some of your most memorable works thus far? I think the artwork you ultimately do for yourself, and that impacts others in the process, is the most important. My self-published zine, “Mental Health and Mythical Beasts,” has inspired neurodivergent fans of creatures and mythology. I also work on a Legend of Zelda-inspired webcomic with my friend. It’s still ongoing with weekly updates and still receives a lot of love online. It’s nice going to conventions and having excited readers come see us. How did DACO help prepare you for your work as an artist? It helped prepare me for taking more classes once I went to Columbus College of Art and Design. The DACO classes are perfect for getting an idea of what to expect from professional art classes. Why is it important to you to make the appreciation for illustration and visual storytelling accessible to Lancaster and southeast Ohio? I know it’s easy to say that it’s because it’s my hometown, but Lancaster and southeast Ohio is the perfect place to nurture the talent of illustrators. After all, Richard F. Outcault, one of the original cartoonists, came from Lancaster, and Jeff Smith, the creator of the Bone comics, often cites Hocking Hills as a key inspiration to his series. I know we showcase plenty of fine art in Lancaster, but illustration should be held at the same level of respect. What can participants expect from your class? What information do you hope to pass on to other artists? Classes are March 15, 22, 29 and April 5 and 19. We’re going to look at our big inspirations for storytelling and illustration, learn the importance of references in drawing and storyboard our ideas. Students will build their own three- to five-page comics from there. While a lot of ideas can come from our heads, I also want to focus on the importance of reference material, careful planning of stories and learning (not copying directly) from our artistic influences. There are many styles to visual storytelling. I look forward to sharing them. Register for Creating Comic Books here. Classes run from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. March 15, 22, 29, April 5 and 19. Cost is $75 public/$68 member.   When editor Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he sought a new kind of comic art. Ross found the wit and satire he desired in a cartoonist named Barbara Shermund, who created a picture of metropolitan life that spoke to the modern-day woman.
Later this month, Judith Yaross Lee will once again bring Shermund’s work to the forefront as she speaks on “The Humor of The New Yorker Magazine” at DACO. Lee, Ohio University Distinguished Professor Emerita of Communication Studies, will host the lecture at 2 p.m. March 29. Cost is $8 for the public and $5 for members prepaid, or $10 at the door. The event will give participants the opportunity to learn how the covers, spot drawings and cartoons by Shermund and her contemporaries brought Ross’s editorial vision to life. Lee recently answered our questions about the New Yorker and Shermund’s role in it. How did Barbara Shermund's work fit into the New Yorker at the time in which they were published? Shermund’s art had three qualities that founding editor Harold Ross and art editor Rea Irvin sought for the new magazine: humor, sophistication and social relevance. The stylish women and men she drew exuded sophistication themselves, partly because her clean, efficient lines matched her subjects’ elegance, and she flattered her readers by playing with their expectations regarding social norms, especially gendered behavior, at a time when educated white women were staking out modern, independent roles in American society. How was her work received at that time in our history? The best evidence of her success is that the New Yorker not only bought her original comic ideas for cartoons and covers, but also assigned her to illustrate service departments such as film and shopping reviews, and sprinkled her smaller drawings across the magazine’s pages as “spots.” Her work appeared in the magazine more than 300 times in its first five years—an average of more than once per issue. Why was her work so important at that time, and how has it transcended generations? Her strong feminist sensibility and her ability to capture the gender politics of her generation and time stood out among the many other artists, both male and female, who contributed to the magazine in the 1920s; the questions she raised about sexual relationships, especially male-female power dynamics, remain relevant today. What drew you to her work and why was her work and story important to share in your book, Defining New Yorker Humor? When I began my research in 1991, I was startled to discover how many women had contributed to the early New Yorker, because no tables of contents existed for the magazine at that point in its history, and the limited research until then was based primarily on memoirs by men, such as James Thurber, who told stories about their colleagues and friends. What studies of the magazine’s literary humor existed so emphasized the misogyny of Thurber’s stories that the whole magazine had developed a reputation as a masculine domain. In this context, the feminism and contemporary sensibility of Shermund’s work stood out all the more, even among the other women artists whose work I recovered and admired, such as Helen Hokinson and Alice Harvey. Register today to learn more at The Humor of the New Yorker magazine with Judith Yaross Lee at DACO at 2 p.m. on March 29: https://tinyurl.com/humorofthenewyorker  A special engagement at the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio is offering a glimpse into the art of cartooning by an award-winning editorial cartoonist. Nate Beeler, former political cartoonist at The Columbus Dispatch, will hold a “Chalk Talk” class from 2 to 3 p.m. March 1 at DACO, 145 E. Main St., Lancaster.
Beeler, who will explain the process behind cartooning, is an award-winning editorial cartoonist for Counterpoint, a groundbreaking new commentary venture. Prior to working as the editorial cartoonist at The Dispatch from 2012 to 2019, the Columbus native drew cartoons for more than seven years in the nation’s capital for The Washington Examiner. His cartoons have appeared in publications, such as USA Today, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time and U.S. News & World Report. He has also been featured on news networks like CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, where viewers of the show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” voted him a “Pinhead.” Beeler began his career as a sophomore working for the Bexley High School student newspaper in Columbus. He graduated with a journalism degree from American University in 2002, and won several top college cartooning awards including the John Locher Award, the Charles M. Schulz Award and a first-place finish in the Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Awards. As one of the most widely syndicated editorial cartoonists, Beeler has had his cartoons distributed internationally to more than 800 publications. He has won numerous professional awards, including the 2008 Clifford K. & James T. Berryman Award from the National Press Foundation, the 2009 Overseas Press Club’s Thomas Nast Award and the 2014 Fischetti Award from Columbia College Chicago. The Society of Professional Journalists also awarded him the Sigma Delta Chi Award for editorial cartoons in 2017, and he has received multiple top honors from the Virginia, Maryland and D.C. press associations. In his spare time, Beeler enjoys ice hockey, guitar and spending time with his three children: Max, 11, Ruby, 6, and Vera, 4. For more information on tickets, click here.  Welcome February – and Barbara Shermund!
Thank you for all your support in helping bringing the art of this amazing woman to life. Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund is the perfect title, and we had record attendance at the member opening party and a terrific turnout at Caitlin McGurk’s Curator's Talk. Next up is political cartoonist Nate Beeler and his “Chalk Talk” artist talk on March 1. Our volunteers, docents, and staff are working hard to welcome our goal of 1,800 visitors to the exhibition, so please bring your friends, family and groups. We would also ask you to become a member this month; we’d like to grow to 400 members strong. Call, stop in or join online. We also welcome any and all who would like to volunteer with us. It’s a growing group, and I think they’re having fun. Sign up today! We’re planning a robust spring and summer of classes and camps, so look for the schedule in coming weeks. And for frequent updates and fascinating art news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I am always eager to hear your feedback on how we’re doing; call, email, text, or stop by any time – the door’s always open! Cheers, David Hogrefe |
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