Exhibition, lectures to honor Cober
Late illustrator and teacher held faculty post at UB from 1987–96

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor

The university will honor the life and work of the late illustrator and teacher Alan E. Cober with a series of events that recognize his innovative and nationally distinguished work, collegial relationships with other artists of national distinction and the great influence he had on the many students he taught as visiting professor of art and Distinguished Visiting Artist at UB from 1987-96.

	COBER

The exhibition, "Alan E. Cober: A Retrospective Afterlife," was organized by the Selby Gallery at the Ringling School of Art and Design, in Sarasota, Fla.

It will open with a reception from 5-8:30 p.m. Feb. 15 in the first floor gallery of the UB Gallery in the Center for the Arts, North Campus, and will continue through May 18.

The reception will be accompanied by several activities in the CFA Screening Room. These include introductions by Sandra Olsen, gallery director, and remarks by President William R. Greiner and Kathleen Howell, an emeritus professor in the Department of Art, who brought Cober to UB.

Following these remarks, Adele Henderson, professor and chair of the Department of Art, and Ellen Cober, the widow of the artist, will present the first Alan E. Cober Scholarship to a UB student of illustration or graphic design.

	"Memorial to an Unexploded Land Mine," etching by Sue Coe from "Tragedy of War" cycle, 2000.

After the presentation, the first lecture in the Alan E. Cober Memorial Lecture Series, entitled "Drawing from Life," will be presented by Cober's colleague, artist Sue Coe, whose 30-year career in the U.S. has been marked by disturbing and controversial work that illustrates her outraged stand toward various social problems as she attempts to educate, influence and inspire change and action in her audience.

Coe has been featured on the cover of Art News, and her work is in the permanent collections of many notable museums and has been the subject of many exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington. Her work has been published as social commentary in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and countless other periodicals.

The lecture is scheduled for 6:30 p.m.

Other lectures in the series, which are free of charge and open to the public, will be delivered by illustrator Barbara Nessim at 6 p.m. April 11 in the CFA Screening Room, and Judy Garlan, art director for the Atlantic Monthly, at 6 p.m. April 25, also in the Screening Room.

An artist, illustrator and educator for more than 25 years, Nessim is chair of the Department of Illustration at Parsons School of Design. Her work has been featured in many major publications, including Rolling Stone, Time and Newsweek, and her paintings and drawings shown in many galleries and museum exhibitions. Since 1980, she has focused on computer art and has lectured widely on the subject.

Garlan worked with Cober on many assignments in her 17 years as art director of the Atlantic Monthly. During her tenure, the magazine won some 400 illustration and design awards, and published work by many of the finest illustrators and photographers in the world.

For more information about any of the events honoring Cober, contact Reine Hauser at 645-6912, ext. 1424, or at rihauser@acsu.buffalo.edu.

Alan Cober frequently is cited as one of the most innovative illustrators America has produced. He was among a small cadre of post-World War II illustrators who inserted concepts drawn from modern art into an art form that was then dominated by sentimental realism.

Cober's work went beyond illustration to include an often shocking visual journalism—pithy pen and ink drawings that critiqued social injustice, like the Times illustrations of school children in Boston who still were segregated, despite laws to the contrary, and a wizened old man held as prey in a nursing home.

His work appeared regularly for decades in top American publications, including Time, Newsweek, Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Life, Look, The New York Times. It was commissioned as well by NBC, CBS and a number of Fortune 500 companies.

He worked on adventure and mystery computer games and illustrated more than 23 books, including "The Tiger's Bones and Other Plays for Children" by the late Ted Hughes, poet laureate of England.

His own book, "The Forgotten Society," shocked the public with its graphic depiction of the lives and often miserable conditions of people incarcerated in retirement homes, prisons and mental institutions like the New York State psychiatric facility at Willowbrook. In a later publication, "The Wake-up Call," he addressed other issues plaguing contemporary America—drug addiction, AIDS, toxic chemicals and hazardous wastes.

Cober also was well-known as a dedicated and influential teacher of young artists, many of whom continue to express gratitude for his guidance in both aesthetic and professional realms that he imparted to them before his death in 1998 at age 62.

Ellen Cober, Nessim and Coe have donated some of the original drawings and sketchbooks in the exhibition so they can continue to be used as an educational resource at UB.

The exhibition and the lectures have been sponsored with the generous assistance and support from the Department of Art, the Department of Art History and Brainstorm—the Communicator's Club of Buffalo.