Daiquiri Jones hurtles through a space in a bikini. Little Nemo races to rescue a princess. And an erstwhile New Yorker contends with the hipster bars that have sprouted in his former digs.
These characters are headed to William Paterson as part of an exhibit set to open Feb. 10 at the Ben Shahn Center for the Visual Arts featuring contemporary interpretations of twentieth-century comic strips.
“It’s really the relatability and familiarity of comics that are always talking about some really advanced ideas, but they do it in such an acceptable way, brilliant in a different version,” University Galleries director Casey Mathern said in an interview.
Mathern said that “Sunday Comics: The Creative Page” reflects the nonconformist social critiques that exemplified the work of the center’s namesake, Ben Shahn, a twentieth-century painter and photographer known for works that the Museum of Modern Art describes as “united by their repudiation of prejudice and injustice.” The exhibit was curated by art professor Dr. Claudia Goldstein.
Visitors to the exhibit will be able to follow the adventures of a faux-retro heroine named Captain Daiquiri Jones in a 1950s-style sci-fi comic. The comic’s creator, cartoonist Geoff Grogan, told the Beacon in an email that his political satire “likes to play with the comics page as a kind of painting.”
Grogan said he draws inspiration is from “Peanuts” comics featuring Charlie Brown and Snoopy. “I’ve learned more about what it means to be human, all the while laughing myself silly, from Charles Schulz’s marvelous creation than from any other single source that I can think of,” Grogan said in the email. “And to me–as an artist–that’s the measure of a great work of art–it’s the fuel for someone else’s creativity, because art is a dialogue. It’s not a solo flight.”
Another featured artist, Gideon Kendall, told the Beacon that he developed his “amusing” experiences living in New York City into a comic named “Gentrification Stormtrooper.”
“I sensed a pattern emerging,” Kendall said in an email. “I saw that I had repeatedly moved from neighborhood to new neighborhood in search of more space and cheap rents and how nearly every place I lived soon after morphed into a hipster playground. Of course, I’m not unique in this. Artists have always been part of the first wave of gentrification. But I thought it would be an interesting visual challenge to make a map/comic hybrid documenting my complicity in this process.”
The exhibit will also feature a reimagining of the comic strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland” by Maëlle Doliveux, a French and Swiss illustrator. Doliveux sent a statement to the Beacon saying her strip was inspired by her own difficulty falling asleep as a child.
The focus of exhibit relates to several courses offered by the Art Department in Spring 2025, including The Art of Comics and Dynamic Figure Drawing.
Mathern said the exhibit reflects the gallery’s commitment to displaying “contemporary art and art about social justice.”