Selby Gallery, Ringling College of Art and Design January 16 – February 18, 2015

January 16 – February 18, 2015

Selby Gallery I:
A Legacy Inscribed: The Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection of Manuscripts

This exhibition features medieval and early modern manuscripts on loan from the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries in Philadelphia. Donated by the late Lawrence J. Schoenberg and his wife Barbara Brizdle to the Penn Libraries in 2011, the manuscripts bear witness to the rich diversity of mankind’s scientific and intellectual traditions before the age of print. From a 5^th-century BC cuneiform debt record inscribed on a clay tablet to an Arabic translation of Euclid’s treatise on mathematics and geometry, a Latin translation of Aristotle on metaphysics, and a beautifully illuminated 16^th-century copy of the Venetian cartographer Battista Agnese’s Portolan atlas of navigation charts for sailing the Mediterranean, the Schoenberg Collection brings together many of the great scientific and philosophical achievements of the ancient and medieval worlds.
Documenting the extraordinary work of scholars, philosophers, and scientists in Europe, Africa, and Asia from ancient times to the 17^th-century, the exhibition illuminates the foundations of our shared intellectual and scientific heritage. Often illustrated with complex diagrams and stunning imagery that both enhance and shape the reader’s experience, the manuscripts on view bring to the present the intellectual legacy of the distant past.

[For More Information]
Penn in Hand: The Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection
A website that provides full digital facsimiles and bibliographic descriptions of manuscripts in the Schoenberg Collection. http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/schoenberg

Transformation of Knowledge
An online version of the catalog of the Schoenberg Collection, published in 2006. http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/ljscatalog

Selby Gallery II:
The Great American Graphic Novel
Original artwork by modern graphic novelists from the collection of George Pratt including examples from: Milton Caniff, Jeff Jones, Barry Windsor-Smith, Berni Wrightson, Joe Kubert, Mike Mignola, Barron Storey, J Muth, Frank Frazetta, George Pratt and Scott Hampton – among others – along with book selections courtesy of Joe Thiel.

This exhibition is a modern complement to the Manuscript exhibition in Gallery I with a selection of related pre-graphic novel and graphic novel illustrations from the collection of Ringling College of Art and Design Illustration instructor and illustrator, George Pratt. The earliest selection in the exhibition is the Sgt. Rock panel created in 1936 by Milton Caniff for DC Comics. All the artists included in the show are either American or heavily influenced American artists, such as Barry Windsor-Smith or Hugo Pratt. 

Many people are often confused about what makes a graphic novel. Graphic novels can be a single, continuous illustrated narrative or sometimes they are collections of shorter stories. They are related to comics as both use sequential visual art, usually with text, that can be told in a series of panels. The first American comics with in-panel dialogue and panelized continuity were created in the late 1800s for newspapers. Many later graphic novel writers and artists were influenced by the war action hero comics of the 1940s and 1950s and got their start at places like Marvel and DC Comics drawing and writing superheroes like The Fantastic Four and X-Men. Most comics historians agree that the first real graphic novel was Will Eisner’s A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories published in 1978. Modern graphic novels often emphasize drama, adventure, character development, striking visuals, politics, or romance over comedy.  A selection of these original novels will be on display from the collection of Joe Thiel, also a Ringling College of Art and Design illustration instructor and illustrator.