D.B. Dowd


Dowd is a writer, illustrator, curator and critic who publishes on the history of illustration and cartooning. His book Stick Figures: Drawing as a Human Practice will be published by Spartan Holiday Books and the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies in July 2018. Dowd is project leader of Serious Thinking About Popular Pictures for the Society of Fellows at the Rockwell Center 2017-19. He is Professor of Art & American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he serves as the Faculty Director of the D.B. Dowd Modern Graphic History Library, renamed in his honor in 2016. He publishes the illustrated journal Spartan Holiday.

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All Sessions by D.B. Dowd

  • Day 2

    July 12

  • The time has come to think about drawing in a fresh way—not as a how-to problem, but as a what-for question. Humans mark things. Archaeologists have excavated bathroom graffiti at Pompeii. Tags, brands, and diagrams are drawings, if nothing else. But traditional drawing instruction does not engage such material. This presentation will explore the symbolic/schematic roots of drawing. Secondary attention will be paid to drawn artifacts—illustrations and cartoons—and their invisibility to high culture.
    Where
    College for Creative Studies



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D.B. Dowd