"Drawing from Home" ft. cartoonists Rina Ayuyang, Ebony Flowers, & Marcel Walker

A virtual event curated by Yona Harvey, featuring writer & cartoonist Ebony Flowers and graphic novelist Rina Ayuyang, moderated by Pittsburgh illustrator Marcel Walker.

The second event in A CAAPP Black Study on Intimacy Part Two, “Drawing from Home” will braid together the ideas of intimacy and resisting, particularly how cartoonists and genre-writers do some of this work, resisting tradition in many forms while creating comics, illustrations, and storytelling that is wholly intimate. The guests will also discuss how in a world where access to groups or geography can exclude or put some on the fringes, intimacy is sometimes born out of these moments of exclusion or rejection.

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Rina Ayuyang is a Filipino American cartoonist based in Oakland, CA. Her latest graphic novel, “Blame This on the Boogie”, explores family, Filipino identity, Pittsburgh, and American pop culture fandom. She has been nominated for an Eisner and Ignatz Awards, and has been honored with a MoCCA Arts Fest Awards of Excellence silver medal. She is also the publisher of Yam Books and co-hosts a comics podcast called The Comix Claptrap. Rina is currently working on her upcoming graphic novel, “The Man in the McIntosh Suit”, a graphic novella inspired by film noir and the 1920’s Filipino American immigration experience in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Ebony Flowers was born and raised in Maryland. She holds a BA in Biological Anthropology from the University of Maryland College Park and a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she wrote her dissertation as a comic (mostly).

Flowers is a 2017 Rona Jaffe Award recipient. Hot Comb, her debut book, appeared on best of 2019 lists from the Washington Post, NPR, the Guardian, and the New York Public Library. Hot Comb won the Eisner, Ignatz, and Believer Book Award, and received nominations for numerous others, including the NAACP Image Award and the YALSA Alex Awards. Flowers lives in Denver, CO, with her son, husband, and cat.

Marcel L. (M.L.) Walker is a Pittsburgh, PA-based freelance artist specializing in graphic prose (a.k.a. “comic books”), illustration, and graphic design. He’s an expert on social applications for the graphic-prose arts, with a mission of championing comic books as a force for social good.

Marcel writes and draws graphic prose, and teaches workshops and classes on comic-books and the narrative arts. His clients have included The Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. In addition to his freelance work, he’s currently the Lead Artist and Project Coordinator for CHUTZ-POW! SUPERHEROES OF THE HOLOCAUST, an ongoing educational series published by the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. In 2017, he was voted Best Local Cartoonist by readers of the Pittsburgh City Paper.

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Similar to last spring‘s Black Study series,  this season of CAAPP’s programming will be intentionally African diasporic and also in conversation with the range of Indigenous and displaced peoples of color. In this Study, we aim to continue to focus our collective curatorial lens on creating, rethinking, working together to shift inherited categories and ideas of race and community.