Little Nemo's Progress: Animation and Contemporary Art

August 6, 2019 - December 14, 2019

Little Nemo’s Progress highlighted the processes (and creative possibilities) involved in crafting animated spatial environments, and illuminated a broad range of innovative animation-based processes, including video game design.  The exhibition featured a selection of works by contemporary artists, including works drawn from the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation Digital Art collection. 

It featured digital, interactive and stop-motion animation by LaTurbo Avedon, Lyndon J. Barrois, Andrea Crespo, Daniel Canogar, Daniel Rozin, Jennifer Steinkamp and Gabrielle Tesfaye.  Together, the exhibited works illuminated a broad range of creative strategies for conceptualizing, fabricating and presenting diverse realms of animated space.   This exhibition had a particular focus on recent innovation in digital animation while also highlighting historically-significant animated works such as Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo (1911) as well as transformative moments in video game design. 

Above all, Little Nemo’s Progress examined how contemporary artists have employed traditional and digital animation, stop motion and other strategies for exploring themes engaged with utopian and/or dystopian visions; issues of constructed and/or performed identity; experiments with sensory stimulation; scenes of revolutionary mass demonstration; and re-imagined art historical genres, tropes, styles and/or movements, including still-life and landscape traditions.