Carol Tyler's Pages & Progress

In my upcoming book, From Panels to Frames: Comics Art and Museums, I am including an interview with Carol Tyler about the very tactile, personal art installations she created based on her multi-Eisner nominated You’ll Never Know graphic novel trilogy, and Soldier’s Heart - the Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father: a Daughter’s Memoir (Fantagraphics), the 2015 book that collects them all together. Her quest to make sense of life’s challenges and her family relationships (parents, husband, and daughter) is both intensely personal and universal for anyone that has ever tried to figure out a difficult relationship. 

Here I am collecting Carol's video, exhibition photos, and other information about her exhibitions. Pages and Progress (video and slides below) was presented at the  University of Cincinnati at DAAP Galleries, Meyers Gallery, February-March, 2016).

Many shows by artists known for comics have become “museumified,” with everything perfectly framed and starkly presented in the Alfred Barr/Museum of Modern Art tradition. Tyler’s installations are very different, distinctly apart from the antiseptic feeling of the white cube. Her graphic style, crammed with detail and drawn in a limited palette of warm tones, is reflected in the design of the exhibition. She invites us in to look at the flotsam of her life and art. Her down to Earth mid-western quality is reflected in a room of drawings fluttering gently on a clothesline, and a second gallery filled with objects like her father’s woodworking tools, toys, memorabilia, and other props that Tyler crafted herself as signs of her process and emotional state. 

In the photos below, you can see some of these handmade props, such as the “table of tears” (a table covered with glass fragments wet with “tears” from a tube feeder on the wall) and the “egometer” where Tyler’s own face appears and disappears like a window shade. There are also self-portraits and thorn sculptures from a later show, Cincinnati Five.

In July 2018, Tyler has created 6 elegant mini-sculptures from the thorns of her honey locust tree and other materials from her farmhouse. If you are interested in purchasing one of these pieces, please contact her directly at cmxmakr@gmail.com.