2 art shows coming up!

Everything But the Kitschen Sync: the 9th annual group show at La Luz de Jesus gallery opens March 3rd. This group show usually features a mixed bag of over 100 artists, and has included me for the last 4 years. It's always a good time. I'm not sure who the other artists are, but previous shows have included the likes of Mark Ryden, Gary Baseman, Mark Todd, Souther Salazar, Gary Taxali, and just about every artist who has ever appeared in Juxtapoz magazine.

Opening March 3rd, 8-11 pm
La Luz de Jesus Gallery
4633 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90027

However... I'm much more excited about Survival of the Fittest: 13 Artists at Harmony Gallery. This is a group show of which I was the curator. It features me and 12 of my favorite artists: Renee French, Levon Jihanian, Andy Kehoe, Kathleen Lolley, Tom Neely, Scot Nobles, Lark Pien, Jesse Reklaw, Billy Reynolds, Zack Soto, Gin Stevens, Scott Teplin and Matthew Thurber. The gallery is also publishing a small press of catalogs for this show.

Opening March 10th, 8-10 pm
Harmony Gallery
5911 1/2 Franklin Ave
Hollywood, CA 90028

I'll post more about these shows soon.

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Wrongful appropriation...

A couple of years ago, my friend Greg and I made an anti-Bush political cartoon called "Brother, Can You Spare a Job?". The cartoon was registered and released under the Creative Commons License so that we could allow it to be widely distributed and used by anyone, as long as they abide by the regulations set by Creative Commons: you must attribute credit to the creators, you may NOT use it for commercial purposes, and you may NOT alter, transform, or build upon this work.

Well, The Anime Network have a little promo commercial that compares Cartoons to Anime... Apparently their message is "Cartoons are gay, but Anime is Awesome!". I guess there's no room in their Robots & Babes themed programming for the cartoony goodness of Japanese animators like Osama Tezuka or Hayao Miyazaki.

You can view the commercial here. If you look closely, you'll see two brief sequences that were appropriated from "Brother, Can You Spare a Job?".

Needless to say, we're not happy to be included in the commercial, and it's in clear violation of our Creative Commons License for the cartoon. I assume the "geniuses" who made the commercial scoured Archive.org for what they thought were public-domain cartoons, found "Brother..." and threw it in the mix.

We're not sure what kind of action we'll need to take, but we intend to put an end to their wrongful appropriation of our cartoon.

Greg Saunders has also blogged about this here and here.

Stay Tuned for further developments.

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