By Charlene Lattea

The Kartoon Kings, an exhibition at the WVU Creative Arts Center last summer, represented a homecoming for one of the artists, Christopher Sperandio, a graduate of the WVU Division of Art who now has a successful career in New York City.

Sperandio came back to the College of Creative Arts, where he completed a bachelor of fine arts degree in printmaking in 1987, to deliver a lecture for the opening of the exhibit. The Kartoon Kings included a selection of work that Sperandio and his colleague, Simon Grennan, donated to the WVU Art Collection.

Sperandio and Grennan have collaborated on many public art projects since 1988, although Grennan now lives in London, England, and Sperandio lives in New York. They are known in the art world for work that is a blend of public art and digital cartoon artistry. Their projects are designed to give voice to ordinary people, and the ordinary people who are the subjects of the work take part in the creative process.

"Mr. Grennan and Mr. Sperandio tweak our notion of what art is and who it is for," wrote an art critic in the New York Times.

They are currently collaborating on artworks for museums and media internationally, including such diverse venues as WIRED magazine, London's Channel Four, DC Comics, and the Museum of Modern Art. They also are developing an animated television series for MTV.

Their work has been the subject of numerous articles in books and journals including the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the London Independent, WIRED, and Flash Art.

The two met in Chicago as graduate students, found they shared common interests, and began working on joint projects. They decided to continue collaborating after graduation because they had unique ideas about art.

"We both think differently from every other artist we ever met," Sperandio said. "We aren't as interested in the art itself as we are in the experience of working together, working with other people, going to different places, and doing different things."

Sperandio and Grennan received their first national recognition in 1993 when, as part of a citywide public art project in Chicago, they joined forces with a dozen union workers at a Nestlé chocolate factory to design and produce a new chocolate bar called "We Got It!" Their work was featured in a New York Times article about new public art.

"The candy bar project got us a lot of attention," Sperandio said. "A project in New York called The Invisible City also got a lot of publicity and an interview in the New York Times."

Sponsored by the New York Public Art Fund, The Invisible City was a series of comic strips posted in subway cars throughout the city during 1999. The cartoons told the stories of people who work at night in New York—a custodian in an office building, a worker in an underground train yard, a waiter, and a stripper. Their own words in the dialogue balloons described the isolation these "invisible" workers felt from the rest of the world.

Sperandio says his interest in art that relates to ordinary people and the working class may be due to his own background. He grew up in Kingwood, where his father was a lineman for the power company and his mother worked in the county employment office. He was always interested in drawing, cartooning, working with clay, and filmmaking, especially.

"One of the first things I bought for myself as a teenager was a movie camera," he said. "I was in 4-H and I did filmmaking projects. Some people had cows in 4-H, but I made movies! However, except for the 4-H involvement, my interest in art was always unstructured, without any kind of adult supervision. The first encouragement I received was when I received a scholarship from WVU.

"I think my work today is a way of trying to reconcile where I came from and where I am now, without trying to make a value judgment about either environment," he said.

Currently, Sperandio and Grennan are doing a project for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in collaboration with DC Comics, the publisher of Superman and Batman. It's a comic book called Modern Masters, in which workers and visitors at the museum tell their stories.

"Our real interest in the project was crossing the museum with the comic book. Both places are huge bureaucracies," Sperandio said.

"The installation will be in a comic book stand, inside the museum, so that visitors passing by can see the artwork and complete their involvement with it by purchasing a 48-page color comic book for three dollars," he explained. "And since the artwork is about people in the museum, they could be strolling by looking at the comic book and pass the person whose story they are reading."

A key ingredient to the success of the art Sperandio and Grennan produce is a computer program Sperandio created that transforms photos into comic illustrations.

"It's kind of a trade secret," he said. "I used to work at a bank doing graphic design and we had a lot of down time, so I was able to noodle around on the computer and come up with this process."

Although he now does almost all of his work by computer, Sperandio was not involved with computers while studying art at WVU.

"When I moved to New York in 1991 and needed a job, I did my résumé on a computer, using Microsoft Word, and that was all the experience I had up to the time I got a job doing design," he said. "But the skills I learned back then don't apply to most of the software that's out now anyway. I taught myself almost all the software that I know and I continue to teach myself.

"Many artists are unwilling to work on computers because they think it's an evil thing that saps creativity and threatens individuality, and I couldn't disagree more," he said. "I also don't draw a line between film and TV and art for the museum, in terms of making a quality distinction between them. TV reaches the most people on a daily basis, so that's where my interest lies—in trying to engage a really big audience, in a fairly traditional way, through entertainment."

In the past couple of years, Sperandio and Grennan have turned their attention to animated cartoon movies. In the spring of 2001 they completed The Hand and the Word in collaboration with the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England.

For this project, they collaborated with the renowned Progressive Players, Gateshead's oldest community theater. The actors selected a short story by Irish author Gerald Griffin and the artists worked with them to transform it into a script and storyboard.

They staged the play, with original sets and costumes, at the Gateshead theater, as well as other sites on location. Grennan and Sperandio filmed each scene and turned the digital footage into more than 4,000 drawings for animation. The film was screened at the Rhode Island International Film Festival in August 2001.

They also are working on a script for a one-hour special on MTV called Bloid. It's the first interactive cartoon-tabloid game show. In each episode, three outrageous stories are animated; one is true and the other two are blatant lies. The audience must figure out which is which.

"MTV saw some of our comic books and invited me in," Sperandio said. "I met with the executive producer and they gave us a development deal to come up with ideas for them."

Sperandio and Grennan aren't afraid to go after what they want. Their artwork is all about connecting with other people. The importance of connections is something Sperandio experienced firsthand at WVU.

"My art professor, Paul Krainak, who is from Chicago, was really helpful to me when I went to graduate school," he said. "He helped me get a job and was very generous about using his contacts. I try to use Paul's example as a model. I do some teaching now and I try to encourage my students and help them. I actually got a meeting at MTV for one of my students—I try to pass along whatever opportunities I get."

After receiving his master of fine arts degree in 1991, Sperandio taught briefly at Princeton University before joining the faculty at Chicago's prestigious School of the Art Institute, where he still teaches as a visiting artist. Grennan currently is completing a doctorate in art history.

The duo just had a survey of their work at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, Scotland, which is the second- most-visited art museum in the United Kingdom. The museum devoted three galleries to The Greatest Hits of Grennan and Sperandio and it commissioned a new work: an animated film about young people in Glasgow between the ages of 16 and 25. That exhibition is currently traveling around England.

"The exhibition in Scotland was thrilling," Sperandio said. "They made huge, colorful banners, 30 feet tall, and put them up on the outside of the museum, announcing the show. I went over for the opening and flew directly into Glasgow from New York. I took a taxi into the center of town, went by the museum, and saw these giant banners that said 'Kartoon Kings.'

"Because I work collaboratively, I can actually be a fan of ours!" he laughed. "Whenever Grennan does something really great, it tickles me because I can appreciate it fully without any kind of embarrassment.

"I had signed off on the banners, but I hadn't really thought about the scale of them, whereas he had been intimately involved in making them. So when I saw them it was like, 'Oh wow, those are enormous!'"

This time, it was Sperandio who completed his involvement in his own artwork by viewing it just like an ordinary person.

A 'Cartoony' Cover: Sperandio Explains
"The idea for the cover image came out of a conversation with Tony Cook, the editor of West Virginia University Alumni Magazine. Tony suggested a drawing of the Mountaineer as a superhero. This was a perfect fit as I'm a pop culture junkie and almost everything I do is an homage to my favorite comics, candy wrappers, toy packaging, and cereal boxes.

Whenever I start a project I do a bit of research. I had a look around for Mountaineer-type images in popular culture. I found lots of representations of the 'frontiersman,' an extremely popular character type in the 1950s but a bit before my time. Among other things, I found some great candy wrappers—ones that coincidentally used a predominantly blue and gold color scheme. I took these colors to use on the cover. The Mountaineer is drawn in a way that's typical of my work for television—very cartoony and a bit clunky.

I tried to give the drawing an overall feeling of simple fun. By making the figure a cutout, it activates the alumni magazine in a new way and turns the Mountaineer into an action figure (albeit circa 1956). I hope at least a few people say 'What the heck!' and break out the scissors."

Art Of, By, and For the People
The Kartoon Kings exhibit at WVU last summer, now part of the WVU Art Collection, features prime examples of Sperandio and Grennan's work, including Fantastic Sh*t (1996), created for the American Fine Arts Museum in New York. This series of large silkscreen images, whose off-register color separations require viewers to wear 3-D glasses to view them properly, highlights stories of supernatural experiences that were obtained by interviewing people who answered ads the artists placed in newspapers.

Comic books in the collection include Cartoon Hits (1996), a project for which Grennan and Sperandio solicited anecdotes from 13 members of London's Institute of Contemporary Art. Another, called Dirt (1996), produced for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, features stories told by unnamed sources about "the essence of celebrity."

There also are selections from a 1993 work called Anyone in New York, in which the artists asked New York University employees who they would like to meet if they could meet anyone in New York City, and the reasons for their choices. Ten meetings were set up, photographed, documented, and exhibited originally in NYU's Grey Art Gallery.

Spring 2002 Contents

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