Link: http://moore.edu/about-moore/blog-publications/blog/adjunct-professor-s-comic-strip-character-is-flying-high-at-the-airport
Alice is back.
Andrea Beizer’s witty cartoon character is saying hello to new audiences in a huge way at Philadelphia International Airport.
Eight blown-up Alice strips are featured on a gallery wall in Terminal C that measures six feet high by 20 feet long. The exhibit went up October 17 and runs through April 2017.
The installation is a big comeback for Alice. The strip has been on hiatus since the late 1980s. Andrea was encouraged to pick the cartoon up again three years ago by a couple of friends, including her mentor, the late editorial cartoonist for the Philadelphia Inquirer Tony Auth. But this a new kind of Alice.
“The original Alice was focused on issues around architecture in Philadelphia,” said Andrea, who is a licensed architect and an adjunct professor of Interior Design at Moore. “This time I want it to be about Alice as a character and who Alice is.”
The strip ran for five years in the Philadelphia Architect, a local newspaper published by the American Institute of Architects’ Philadelphia chapter. It also appeared in the Manhattan Comic News.
Andrea says she’s changed the drawing a bit, giving Alice different body proportions, and she’s made Alice older.
“The new Alice is a mature, single woman struggling to survive in the complex world we live in,” she said. “I’d like to also touch on her inner life, her thoughts and feelings about life in general.”
How the larger-than-life Alice came to be on the wall at the airport is the work of Leah Douglas, director of exhibitions and chief curator at PHL.
“After 18 years as the curator, I have shown illustrations but never cartoons,” Leah said. “I searched for an artist who worked in that genre and found the Alice series.”
A descriptor next to the installation notes that Alice bears a variety of traits that almost anyone can relate to: ‘At times, Alice is witty, sarcastic, curious, forgetful, and aloof. Also, her quips are often meant to be double entendres. Is she being comedic, dead-pan serious, or a bit of both?’
“There is something about the simplicity of how Andrea draws that I also found appealing and it is especially evident in the black-and-white versions,” said Leah.
Only ticketed passengers at the airport can see the exhibit. But Leah says over one month, there are approximately 300,000 to 400,000 passengers who go through Terminal C. You can see Alice on Andrea’s blog, and at Alice Cartoons on Facebook.
Andrea says she’s often asked how she came up with the name ‘Alice.’
“When I was in kindergarten at J. Hampton Moore Elementary in Philadelphia, I was friendly with a very sweet little girl named Alice,” she said. “It was at a visit to her home that I discovered the wonderful books by Dr. Seuss, which made a huge impression on me. After my kindergarten year, I never saw Alice again, but I always retained fond memories of her.”
When Andrea isn’t teaching at Moore or at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, she’s in her studio.
“I work with a lot of color,” Andrea said. “I spend a lot of time figuring out palettes. I’ve been very interested in myths and religious traditions and bringing that into the artwork.”
Perhaps some inspiration for her color comes from her two brightly feathered parrots – a yellow-naped amazon named Shana Punim, which means ‘pretty face’ in Yiddish, and a white-fronted amazon named Lillybelle.
“Both are good talkers,” she said. “I talk to them like they are a person.”
Published on November 7th, 2016