International Art Show, Thursday Feb 8

Feb 5

Out of Africa & Congo, Into Eastside High School, a Comics Art Show With An Event Open to the Public: A Comics Installation

The Sequential Artists Workshop
710 SE 2d Street
Gainesville, FL 32601
Thursday, Feb 8, 2018
5:30 - 7:30 pm
Facebook Event Here

The Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) in downtown Gainesville is proud to be working with the UF African Studies Center to bring the work of two esteemed African artists to Gainesville’s public. SAW Executive Director and award-winning cartoonist Tom Hart, along with visual artist Didier Viodé based in France and from Benin, and prize-winning novelist Fiston Mwanza Mujila based in Austria and from DR Congo will visit Eastside High School on Wednesday, February 7 for a pair of workshops on comics, racism, rumor, magic, and artistic expression.

On Thursday, February 8, SAW will host a public installation presenting some of the student comic art work from the Eastside High workshop, work about SAW and its history of teaching comics in Gainesville, and work by and words from three African artists, the visual art of Didier Viodé (seen above), formerly a comic artist, the comics of a Congolese comic artist Papa Mfumu’eto, owned by UF’s Smathers Library; and the fiction of Fiston Mwanza, best known for prize-winning Tram 83. Didier Viodé, formerly a comics artist and now a painter from Benin, will speak with Hart about comic arts practices on a global scale and in everyday life from Africa to France to Florida & the USA to Congo.

During the workshops at Eastside School, students will especially be challenged to fathom the comics of special Congolese comic artist, Papa Jaspé-Saphir Mfumu’eto..

The Carter Conference too is part of plans to further study and display the contents of this astonishing collection for large publics and students. In conjunction with the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, planning for the world’s first exhibition focusing on this African comic artist has begun. To aid in the preparations, UF devoted this annual conference to discussions about global, African, and Gainesville comics and the popular arts of the continent’s city streets.

UF hopes Papa Mfumu’eto, this unusually creative artist of comic works, will come to Gainesville when the exhibition opens as soon as 2020. It will be another occasion for collaborations with the Sequential Artists Workshop and the Gainesville’s public schools.

These two events, the Eastside High School visits and the Public Installation at the Sequential Artists Workshop, received generous funding from the City of Gainesville’s Office of Parks, Recreation Cultural Affairs, UF's Center for African Studies, and especially the UF Center for the Humanities & the Public Sphere. Both events are associated with the annual African Studies Carter Conference, this year devoted to sequential art forms, African arts, and the work of one Congolese comic artist; for more information click here.