Sunday, April 18, 2021 | 10–10:30am
ADMISSION: This online program is free
One of pop culture's most iconic heroes, Superman is a touchstone for those feeling alienated, lost, and separated from their true identities. It's no wonder that he and many of our most beloved superheroes were created by first-generation Jewish immigrants whose parents fled anti-Semitism in the early twentieth century; empathizing deeply with trauma and loss, these artists used their characters to express their own conflicted senses of self. Journey to Kandor and beyond as we explore the real lives behind fictional heroes in the next installment of Sunday Stories with special guest Marcel Lamont Walker.
Marcel Lamont (M.L.) Walker is an award-winning graphic-prose creator and expert in social applications for comic-book art. A Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania native, Walker graduated from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and has taught classes and workshops in comic book creation for over twenty-five years. He is the lead artist, book designer, and project coordinator for the acclaimed comic-book series CHUTZ-POW! SUPERHEROES OF THE HOLOCAUST, published by The Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. He is also the president of the board of directors for the ToonSeum, a Pittsburgh–based nonprofit that champions comic books as a force for social good. Awards Walker has won include the BMe Community Genius Fellowship and 2017 Best Local Cartoonist as voted by readers of the Pittsburgh City Paper.
There are many forms of memory: memories of events we have experienced, memories we have heard as family stories and from popular culture, even memories of an imagined future. The twenty-four artists in From Generation to Generation: Inherited Memory and Contemporary Art worked with memories that were not their own. They remembered and recalled stories that were never theirs and assembled them in a variety of media to be seen, heard, and experienced by others. At once intimate and shared, the memories they worked with were second-hand experiences, culled from a photograph they saw, or a story they heard, or even a once subconscious memory. The artists were secondary witnesses to the past events they used in their works, and it is precisely this distance in time and space that allowed them to offer powerful narratives open to a wide range of interpretation and expression.