Boston, MA - Franklin Einspruch, an artist and writer in Boston, will travel to Vienna, Austria in 2019 for a two-month art residency.
The Fulbright-Q21/MuseumsQuartier Artist-In-Residence is awarded by the Fulbright organization to one U.S.-based applicant every year. The residency is a cooperative effort between the Fulbright U.S. Scholar program and Q21, a collective of more than sixty alternative art groups within the MuseumsQuartier. The MuseumsQuartier is one of the largest districts for art and culture in the world. It includes the Leopold Museum and MUMOK, the modern art museum. His Q21 appointment is with KABINETTpassage, a space für Comic und Artverwandtes (roughly, "for comics and related species").
Einspruch will be the first Fulbright-Q21 resident to work with one of Q21's comics institutions. He will be the thirteenth recipient in all, and the first since 2012 not to be affiliated with a college or university.
Einspruch works in comics poetry, a hybrid creative form that uses comics to create poetic experiences. "In the way that traditional poetry uses words, comics poetry draws upon all the devices that go into comics: words, pictures, panels, speech and thought balloons, and more," he explains.
His project in Austria will be "a cycle of comics poems about Vienna, an investigation of the city in comics-poem form," according to his description at the Q21 website. "I plan a diaristic or documentary approach, but with the typical rules discarded in favor of the possibilities of poetry to alter narrative, and those of drawing to push the imagery into the realm of the suggestive and imaginary."
The project is titled Regarding Th.at. It will be launched in April 2019 in conjunction with National Poetry Month, at http://regardingth.at. "I wanted to take advantage of Austria's ".at" country code top-level domain to do something evocative," he says. While he creates art in traditional mediums, mostly ink and gouaches, he has long been interested in the potential of technology to produce artistic effects. He scans his works on paper, and transforms and arranges the digital images using programs that he has written himself.
Einspruch was among the early practitioners of comics poetry when the genre emerged in the mid-2000s. He has posted his work at The Moon Fell On Me (themoonfellonme.com) since 2006. Einspruch published the first anthology of comics poetry, titled Comics as Poetry (ISBN: 978-0-9883933-1-8), in 2012. His work has also appeared in anthologies published by the Boston Comics Roundtable, as well as Ink Brick, a journal of comics poetry. He will debut a new book of comics poetry at the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo in October 2018.
In addition to his work in comics poetry, Einspruch is an exhibiting painter with a studio in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston. He is also active as an art critic, contributing regularly to The New Criterion and producing an online journal, Delicious Line.
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A link to http://themoonfellonme.com/2018/03-kingdom-of-ice/ would be appreciated.Franklin Einspruch, panel from Kingdom of Ice, 2018, from The Moon Fell On Me, ©2018 Franklin Einspruch
Franklin Einspruch, franklin@einspruch.com
