CSA: Preview Midnight in Molina
New Hazlett CSA: Cole Hoyer-Winfield’s Midnight in Molina from The Glassblock on Vimeo.
As part of The Glassblock’s sponsored partnership with the New Hazlett Theater, The Glassblock will be presenting a series of editorially-independent previews and reviews of the 2016-2017 Community Supported Art (CSA) Performance Series. Follow along here, and learn more about how you can experience this season’s CSA here.
Though he was born in Chicago and raised in Englewood, New Jersey, artist Lynd Ward’s year in Leipzig, Germany, from 1926 to 1927, was to have a profound influence on his work. It was there that he honed his skill in etching, engraving, and lithography, much of it in the German Expressionist style dominant during those interwar years. Like the uncanny set design of the 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the woodcut storytelling craft that grew in Weimar Germany utilized fields of black and white, shadow and light, to create stark, sometimes jarring, visual contrast to achieve moody, melodramatic, or downright sinister tones. Typically wordless, these early graphic novels relied solely on painstaking imagery to tackle topics like political and economic injustice, oppression, and other socially-minded, earnest subjects. “To make a wood engraving is to insist on the gravitas of an image,” famed American cartoonist Art Spiegelman wrote in 2010. “Every line is fought for, patiently, sometimes bloodily. It slows the viewer down. Knowing that the work is deeply inscribed gives an image weight and depth.”