Detail View: University Art Galleries (UMassD): A Retrospective Afterlife

Alan E. Cober A Retrospective Afterlife

September 13 - October 17, 2001

2001

University Art Gallery (UMass Dartmouth Galleries)

Organized by Kevin Dean

Selby Gallery Ringling School of Art and Design

One of America's most innovative illustrators, the late UB faculty member Alan E. Cober's gripping images provide glimpses of the often harsh reality of contemporary events. This exhibit includes more than 100 works, representing both his work as an illustrator and as a fine artist. Cober's visual commentary was seen in such publications as Rolling Stone, Time, The New York Times, Esquire, Newsweek, Life and Look. Like most of the drawings, engravings and sculptures in "Alan E. Cober: A Retrospective Afterlife," these darkly humorous hallucinogenic visions can only be described as, well, Kafkaesque. And like Kafka, Cober returns throughout his career to familiar motifs and themes, incorporating into his art all manner of skulls, limbs, menacing machines, pig snouts and medieval demons. His fascination with mental and physical decay, compassion for social issues, and penchant for biological permutations form the thread that runs throughout his prolific career, including time spent in Buffalo.

illustration

http://www.adams-studio.com/A%20sense%20of%20darkness%20and%20drama%20in%20cober%27s%20art.htm

http://www.ubartgalleries.org/?gallery=art&select=event&eventID=100

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ephemera - invitation

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UMass Dartmouth Art Galleries

Alan E. Cober

American

May 18, 1935 - January 17, 1998

Alan Cober frequently is cited as one of the most innovative illustrators America has produced. He was among a small cadre of post-World War II illustrators who inserted concepts drawn from modern art into an art form that was then dominated by sentimental realism. Cober's work went beyond illustration to include an often shocking visual journalism—pithy pen and ink drawings that critiqued social injustice, like the Times illustrations of school children in Boston who still were segregated, despite laws to the contrary, and a wizened old man held as prey in a nursing home. His work appeared regularly for decades in top American publications, including Time, Newsweek, Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Life, Look, The New York Times. It was commissioned as well by NBC, CBS and a number of Fortune 500 companies. He worked on adventure and mystery computer games and illustrated more than 23 books, including "The Tiger's Bones and Other Plays for Children" by the late Ted Hughes, poet laureate of England. His own book, "The Forgotten Society," shocked the public with its graphic depiction of the lives and often miserable conditions of people incarcerated in retirement homes, prisons and mental institutions like the New York State psychiatric facility at Willowbrook. In a later publication, "The Wake-up Call," he addressed other issues plaguing contemporary America—drug addiction, AIDS, toxic chemicals and hazardous wastes. Cober was an influential and beloved illustration teacher. He was a professor of art and distinguished visiting artist at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York. He also held the Lamar Dodd Professorial Chair at the University of Georgia, and, at the time of his death, was teaching at the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida, where the Ringling Brothers circus, which he loved to draw, retired for the winter. His work is held in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the New Britain Museum. During his last two years he was exploring the medium of clay as an extension of his drawing.

http://www.buffalo.edu/ubreporter/archive/vol33/vol33n16/n8.html

http://www.societyillustrators.org/Awards-and-Competitions/Hall-of-Fame/Past-Inductees/2011--Alan-E--Cober.aspx

A Retrospective Afterlife

illustration

2001

10/08/13

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