Small Press Spotlight on Ryan Claytor
Small Press Spotlight on Ryan Claytor
Cartoon Art Museum Exhibition: December 13, 2008 - March 8, 2009
Beginning on December 13, 2008, the Cartoon Art Museum's ongoing Small Press Spotlight will feature the art of Ryan Claytor.
Ryan Claytor is a comics artist and teacher living in Lansing, Michigan. In 2007, he earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from San Diego State University with an emphasis in multimedia, researching autobiography in comics. Claytor's achievements have included a Cartoonist-in-Residence position at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, California, visiting lecturerships at the Dallas Museum of Art and Michigan State University and an internship with Marvel Comics in New York City.
Claytor is most widely known for his self-published, autobiographical, comic book series And Then One Day. Although the series has undergone several format changes and incarnations since its inception in 2004, And Then One Day readers are consistently treated with Claytor’s thoughtful and entertaining personal anecdotes immaculately packaged with a designer’s eye for production detail. Most recently, in the summer of 2008, he released a republication of his Master's Thesis on autobiography in comics entitled Concatenations.
Claytor was also an artist and event organizer for the first 24 Hour Comics Day in 2004. Subsequently, his twenty-four hour comic about relationships with passed relatives was chosen from hundreds of worldwide submissions as one of the best stories of the day and included in the nationally distributed anthology, 24 Hour Comics Day Highlights 2004.
During the summer of 2007, Claytor embarked on the most ambitious tour ever organized by a self-publishing comic book artist. This North American In-Store Signing Tour took Claytor to eighteen states and two Canadian Provinces where he signed books, spoke about his work, and held art exhibitions at fifty different museums, bookstores, libraries, and comic book specialty shops.
For more information about Ryan Claytor or any of his work, visit his website, www.ElephantEater.com
About the Small Press Spotlight:
San Francisco has been a hotbed of innovative, groundbreaking comic art since the late 1800s with the advent of the modern comic strip. In the1960s, the Bay Area gained further notoriety when the underground comix movement launched from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. Today, some of the biggest names in alternative and small-press comics hail from the Bay Area, and the Cartoon Art Museum's Small Press Spotlight focuses on the works of these talented individuals.
The Small Press Spotlight is funded in part by The Zellerbach Family Foundation and The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation.