San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
EXHIBIT AT SAMA REVEALS COMIC BOOK HEROES IN A RANGE OF PERSPECTIVES.
Summer exhibit at SAMA reveals Superman, Wonder Woman in a range of perspectives
“Men of Steel, Women of Wonder,” the big summer show at the San Antonio Museum of Art, deals with Superman and Wonder Woman, but visitors shouldn’t expect to get up close and personal with a bunch of framed comic book covers. There’s a reason for that.
“I am a comic book reader,
I’m a comic book lover,” curator Alejo Benedetti said. “There’s something really special about it. But the thing about that is that you hold it in your hands and you advance the narrative yourself. If you remove that, if you put it up on the walls, you would be doing a disservice to the medium itself.”
That’s not to say there are no representations of the genuine article in the show. A glass case holds Joe Schuster’s Action Comics cover from 1938, not long after Superman debuted, showing everyone’s favorite Kryptonian lifting a car over his head, and Harry G. Peter’s 1942 Sensation Comics issue marking Wonder Woman’s first appearance on a cover.
The exhibition catalog also was designed to re-create the experience of paging through comics. Rather than being published in a thick slab of a book, the catalog is packaged as a boxed set of five slim volumes the size and shape of comic books.
The exhibit explores Superman and Wonder Woman from a range of perspectives, said Lana Meador, an assistant curator at the museum, during a media preview of the show.
“Tracing their origins from the Great Depression and World War II, periods of social unrest, to contemporary artists’ fresh perspectives and interpretations of them, the exhibit underscores the hero and our need for a hero in the way that really transcends time periods and cultures,” Meador said.
The exhibit touches on a number of up-to-the-minute issues, including identity and immigration. In one gallery, Rich Simmons’ 2014 mixed media work “Between the Capes” depicts Superman and Batman sharing a passionate kiss. Works in another gallery delve into the status of Superman and Wonder Woman as immigrants, including Vincent Ramos’ 2016 work “Barbed Wire, Chain Link & the Lasso of
Truth,” which depicts Lynda Carter, the Mexican-American actress who played Wonder Woman in the 1970s TV series, standing behind a chain link fence, evoking the border wall.
The show originated at Crystal Bridges Museum of American
Art in Bentonville, Ark., where Benedetti is assistant curator. It is the first time that Crystal Bridges has sent a show to the San Antonio Museum of Art.
“It was really exciting for us to have the chance to bring this show here,” museum director Katie Luber said. “Crystal Bridges is this juggernaut, this new thing, in our country. For us to have a chance to work with them was exciting.”
The exhibit features more than 75 works by 51 artists, including:
Fahamu Pecou’s “Nunna My Heroes: After Barkley Hendricks’ ‘Icon for My Man Superman:’” The 2011 painting is the first work visible as visitors come into the gallery. It’s a striking work in which an African-American man in a suit rips open his white button-down to reveal a Superman-esque logo beneath, with an “F” for Fahamu replacing the “S.”
It’s a good introduction to what the show holds, Benedetti said, because it draws on the idea that people encounter superheroes in some way — on backpacks or T-shirts or as a way to describe people they revere — every day.
Red, white and blue bands frame the work, with “Ain’t nuthin but a sandwich” written across the top.
“That’s his reference to ‘a hero ain’t nothing but a sandwich,’ this saying that has a larger implication about how we can’t just wait around for a hero to come save us, we have to become our own hero, and he does that when he casts himself as the sort of heroic figure with that ‘F,’ that Superman ‘F,’” Benedetti said.
Jim Shaw’s “The Issue of My Loins:” The 2015 installation gets at a few ideas threaded throughout the show, including everyday heroes and their vulnerability. The space is lined with drawings that Shaw’s dad made while taking an art class through the mail. Each has been marked with corrections, made in red ink; one wall is covered with feedback his dad got, some of it pretty brutal. The back wall is filled with a black-and-white mural depicting Superman’s crotch, including the belted underwear worn over tights.
“It looks like it’s just a mural, but it’s actually a false wall that is cut out, and as you look inside, those are the family jewels,” said Benedetti, pointing out large, other-worldly gems glowing behind the wall and noting how Shaw uses humor in his work to communicate larger themes. “You have a moment like that, you think about the vulnerability of a character like Superman, who seemingly is all powerful, but as soon as you throw some kryptonite into the ring, he’s incapacitated. The strongest man even has a weakness. And this idea of vulnerability becomes essential to our understanding of this show.”
The installation’s placement at the start of the show, he said, is intentional.
“It is meant to indicate to you that we’re going to get into some things in this show,” he said. “It’s not just going to be pretty pictures of Superman and Wonder Woman. There’s depth and there’s range in these works.”
Renée Cox’s “Eruption” and “Chillin’ With Liberty:” The 1998 images depict Cox herself as a superhero she calls Rajé. They are part of a series of works inspired by a trip to Toys R Us with her children when she noticed that there were no African-American action figures.
Cox radiates power in her work, particularly in the piece showing her clutching shattered chains in each hand.
“Renée Cox is a brilliant artist, and she understands the connections that are in place there and understands that if she, a black woman, presents this character who is standing there with broken chains, that it’s not just a powerful connection to this character of Wonder Woman, but it’s also a powerful commentary on American history and American present,” Benedetti said. “She is layering all these different things into her work.”
Jason Bard Yarmosky’s “Wintered Fields:” The large-scale 2016 painting depicts an elderly woman dressed in Wonder Woman’s distinctive leotard, her body a reflection of the wages of getting older.
“This is not how we expect to see Wonder Woman, certainly,” Benedetti said. “She’s older, she’s not in tip-top physical shape. So that’s a little jarring in and of itself, and gives us to wonder, OK, why are we always associating youth and beauty with these heroes?”
That question takes on some new dimension with the revelation that the woman in the painting is Yarmosky’s grandmother, who battled Alzheimer’s disease.
“He makes this sort of realization that Wonder Woman is powerful. Wonder Woman goes out and she fights against terrors on a daily basis. She chooses to do that,” Benedetti said. “(Yarmosky’s) grandmother does not have that option. She gets up every morning and she faces up against this terrible disease and she does it with dignity.
“That is truly a superpower.”
The idea of superheroes among us is laced throughout the show, including a pair of images from photographer Dulce Pinzón’s series depicting immigrants going about their everyday business — doing laundry, making deliveries — wearing superhero garb.
That notion is also woven into the part of the show dealing with the characters’ origins. Superman was created in 1938, and Wonder Woman came along three years later.
“Superman is coming right out of the Great Depression,” Benedetti said. “Wonder Woman is very much a product of World War II.”
The exhibit includes imagery that fed into the characters, including depictions of musclebound men engaged in construction and portraits of pin-up girls and of women working in factories.
The latter also is represented in Norman Rockwell’s iconic
1943 painting of “Rosie the Riveter,” a hard-working gal with a compact tucked into her pocket, her lips painted the perfect shade of red.
“This is the same atmosphere that Wonder Woman is born into, that she is expected to be both powerful and beautiful, simultaneously,” Benedetti said.
The inclusion of such a wellknown image in the show delights Luber.
“She is an icon,” Luber said. “I never thought of her in the context of a superhero. And I love that. It’s completely changed my vision of her.”