Anime and Comic Art Take Over Blue Velvet Studio During LoDa ArtWalk

Downtown Mobile’s Blue Velvet Studio traded its usual fare for capes, mechas and graphic novels on Friday, June 10, 2011, hosting an Anime & Comic Art Exhibit from 6 to 9 p.m. during the LoDa ArtWalk. The one-night show put comic books, Japanese animation and fantasy illustration at the center of the city’s monthly downtown art celebration, and for visitors who wanted a second look, viewing was also available by appointment at the studio’s space at 709 Dauphin Street, Suite 2.

The exhibit gathered comics, animation and fantasy art, computer graphics, illustrations, graphic novels, CG videos and action figures into one room. That range made it one of the more unusual stops on the June ArtWalk circuit: while neighboring galleries hung paintings and photography, Blue Velvet Studio filled its walls and shelves with the visual culture of comic books and anime, from penciled pages to imported figures to digital video work projected for passersby.

Guests were invited to go a step further than looking. Animated costumes were encouraged, making the studio one of the few stops on the ArtWalk circuit where dressing as a favorite character was part of the program. The invitation turned the exhibit into a participatory event rather than a passive one, and it gave local fans of anime and comics — a community that rarely had a dedicated public showcase in downtown Mobile at the time — a reason to show up in full costume on a Friday night.

Nineteen Artists, One Wall

The lineup of contributing artists ran to nineteen names, a cross-section of the Gulf Coast’s comic and illustration community alongside creators from further afield. Among them were Amin Amat, Scott O. Brown, Drew Gilbert, Kory Hill, April Hopkins, Tim Irwin, Jamie Jennings, Billy Jordan, Kevin LaPorte, Chase Matthews, LaToya McCoy, Patty McLaughlin, Veronica Morton, James Powell, Amanda Rachels, Jamie Smith, Amy Woodward and Ferran Xalabarder. The roster mixed working illustrators, comic book creators, designers and hobbyists, and it demonstrated how much talent in the region had grown up on anime, manga and American comic art rather than on the gallery traditions more commonly represented downtown.

For the contributing artists, the show offered something that mainstream gallery exhibitions rarely do: an audience primed for their subject matter. ArtWalk crowds skew curious and broad, but a themed exhibit draws the people who actually care about the medium — readers, collectors, cosplayers and young artists looking at how working creators put pages together. Several of the names on the wall were connected to small-press and independent comic publishing, a corner of the industry where Southern creators have historically had to build their audiences show by show rather than through big-city conventions alone.

LoDa ArtWalk and the Dauphin Street Corridor

The LoDa ArtWalk — the Lower Dauphin district’s monthly open-house celebration of galleries, studios, shops and restaurants — provided the backdrop. On ArtWalk nights, Dauphin Street fills with pedestrians moving between venues, and the event has long served as downtown Mobile’s most reliable way to put new audiences in front of working artists. Blue Velvet Studio’s location at 709 Dauphin Street, Suite 2 placed it directly in the path of that foot traffic, and the anime theme gave walkers a sharply different option from the storefronts around it.

Studio spaces like Blue Velvet occupy an important middle ground in the local art economy. They are more intimate than commercial galleries, more flexible about subject matter, and often more willing to hand wall space to emerging creators or unconventional media. A computer-generated video loop or a shelf of action figures would be an awkward fit in many exhibition settings; at a studio during ArtWalk, it is simply part of the show.

Anime, Comics and the Gulf Coast Fan Community

Anime and comic art occupy a distinctive place in Southern popular culture. The medium arrived in the region the way it did everywhere else — through imported television series, translated manga, video stores and, later, the internet — and it built a following that had few public outlets. Conventions in Atlanta, New Orleans and Houston served as the regional gathering points, but between those events, fans in Mobile and along the Gulf Coast had few places where their enthusiasm was visible in public. A themed exhibit on Dauphin Street during ArtWalk was a small but meaningful step toward giving that community a local home.

The costume element of the evening recognized that reality directly. Cosplay — dressing as characters from anime, comics and games — is fundamentally a social practice, and it thrives on public settings where costuming is welcomed rather than merely tolerated. By explicitly encouraging costumes, the studio signaled that fans did not have to leave their enthusiasm at the door, and the mix of artwork on the walls and costumed guests in the aisles gave the exhibit the atmosphere of a miniature convention compressed into a single storefront.

The exhibit’s content also traced the breadth of the medium. Animation cels and prints sat near computer graphics work; graphic novels and comic pages illustrated how Japanese and American traditions borrow from each other; CG videos showed the digital side of a scene often thought of as purely drawn; and action figures connected the art to the collector culture that supports it. For visitors who knew anime only from television, the show functioned as a survey course in how wide the field runs.

What It Meant for Downtown Mobile

Events like this one are part of how downtown entertainment districts stay fresh. ArtWalk’s core audience returns month after month, and the event depends on venues offering something new each time to keep the crowds circulating. A themed exhibit built around anime and comics accomplished several things at once: it drew younger visitors into the district, it gave regional artists a public platform, and it demonstrated that “art” on ArtWalk night extends beyond the traditional gallery categories.

The by-appointment viewing option extended the exhibit’s life beyond the three-hour Friday window, which matters for working artists whose audiences often cannot attend evening events. It also reflects how small studios operate — the space continues to serve its regular purpose, and special exhibitions are woven around it rather than replacing it.

For the nineteen contributing artists, the show added a Mobile credit to their exhibition histories and put their work in front of an audience that included collectors, fellow creators and the simply curious. Shows of this kind rarely generate headlines, but they are the connective tissue of a regional art scene: the places where an illustrator meets a fan, a young artist sees finished work up close for the first time, and a downtown district proves, one First-Friday-style night at a time, that its creative community is broader than most people assume.

The Anime & Comic Art Exhibit at Blue Velvet Studio stands as a snapshot of June 2011 in downtown Mobile: a monthly art walk opening its doors wider, a studio willing to hand its walls to capes and mechas, and a regional community of comic and anime artists getting a well-earned night in the spotlight.

Behind the Roster

A nineteen-artist lineup does not assemble itself, and the breadth of names on the wall illustrated how comic and anime art is actually produced in the region. Some contributors were primarily illustrators whose day-to-day work involves commissions, editorial art and design; others wrote and drew their own small-press comics, self-publishing issues and selling them at area shows; still others worked in digital media, producing the CG imagery and video that rounded out the exhibit. The mix is typical of the medium, which has always lived at the intersection of fine drawing, commercial art and fan culture.

Group shows also serve a practical purpose for artists working in a genre that mainstream galleries have historically overlooked. A solo exhibition of comic art is a hard sell in most Southern art markets; a themed group show spreads the risk, guarantees variety for the audience and gives each creator exposure to the others’ followings. Visitors who came for one artist’s page style left having seen eighteen others, and the cross-pollination that happens in a room full of working artists is often as valuable as the sales.

The inclusion of creators from outside the immediate Gulf Coast — names associated with comic publishing scenes further afield — gave the exhibit a wider frame as well. It connected Mobile’s fan community to the broader network of independent comic creators, and it showed local artists that the distance between their sketchbooks and published work was shorter than it might appear.

The June 2011 ArtWalk Night

The Friday, June 10, edition of LoDa ArtWalk ran on the event’s usual schedule, with venues along Lower Dauphin opening their doors from late afternoon into the evening and the exhibit window at Blue Velvet Studio running 6 to 9 p.m. On a summer ArtWalk night, the district’s sidewalks carry a mix of regulars and visitors — families, college students, downtown residents and shoppers drifting between stops — and themed exhibits compete for attention with live music, gallery openings and restaurant patios.

Standing out in that environment requires more than good work on the walls, which is where the costume invitation and the action figures and CG videos earned their place. The studio offered an experience, not just an exhibition, and experience-driven stops tend to hold ArtWalk crowds longer than traditional hangs. For younger visitors in particular — the demographic most connected to anime and comics — the evening provided a rare instance of downtown Mobile speaking directly to their interests.

The exhibit also fit into the longer arc of the LoDa district’s development. Mobile’s downtown revival has depended on independent businesses, studios and venues giving people reasons to come downtown outside of working hours, and ArtWalk has been the monthly showcase for that effort. Every unconventional exhibit that draws a crowd strengthens the case that the district’s creative economy can support a wider range of expression than the traditional gallery model alone.

By the end of the night, the exhibit had done what the best ArtWalk stops do: introduced the district’s regulars to an art form they might otherwise have passed by, given nineteen artists a public audience, and made room — literally — for the Gulf Coast’s anime and comic fans to see themselves represented on Dauphin Street. The by-appointment viewings at 709 Dauphin Street, Suite 2 kept the work visible after the crowds went home, extending a single Friday night’s celebration into the weeks that followed.