April 30 through June 11, 2017
Francie Bishop Good used photographs from her 1967 and her mother’s 1942 Allentown High School Comus yearbooks as a departure point for imagination. She altered these images through digital manipulation, painting, drawing, and collage, creating interventions that explored the passage of time and the yearbook’s iconic status in American culture.
Almost all of the digital collage elements that the artist added to the portraits came from her own art, including her photography as well as digital photos of drawings, paintings, and ceramics from throughout her career. She drew on these varied materials and her childhood memories of Allentown, marking each vintage portrait so that it reflected the passage of time. Her artistic interventions illuminated connections between present and past, personal artifact and historical event.
Featured image: Francie Bishop Good, Comus Series #354, 2015, archival pigment print on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist and David Castillo Gallery, Miami
COMUS Series was supported through the generosity of the Harry C. Trexler Trust, the Julius and Katheryn Hommer Foundation, the Century Fund, the Bernard and Audrey Berman Foundation, the Leon C. and June W. Holt Endowment, the Martin Guitar Charitable Foundation, the Rider-Pool Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Friends of the Museum.