Author: Michael Witthaus

Luna Moth Zine Fest champions DIY spirit

Three years on, Luna Moth Zine Fest is back and bigger than ever. There are more vendors (“tablers” in the parlance), and workshops covering storytelling, crowdfunding, game drawing and community care. The festival also has its first group of paid sponsors, plus a new and larger location in Manchester, after two years in Salem.

It’s a big leap for an event that began when cartoonist April Landry grew frustrated with long drives to similar events, so she decided to do one in her home state. Landry named the festival after a species of moth that’s native to the region and found in the wild, seemingly in defiance of nature.

“It’s very strange that something that vibrant and almost tropical-looking lives in New England,” she said. “It’s a magical-looking thing, a little mythical, so it’s a way to say New England-based and New Hampshire-based while also giving it this ethereal vibe. It’s a little special.”

For anyone wondering, zines are small circulation booklets — comics, word art, ephemera, covering all manner of topics. They’re self published, rather than commercially, and exist “for self expression, art, storytelling, information sharing and pure creative joy … passion projects for humans, by humans,” according to a festival press release.

“The great thing about zines is that anybody can make a zine, and anybody can put whatever they want in a zine,” Landry said. “There’s no publisher telling you, ‘you can’t do that’ and no editor telling you can’t do anything. There’s literally no barrier between your idea and getting it out into the world with zines.”

Landry entered the zine world after she designed a Dungeons & Dragons world to play with friends. “Once the game night was over, I felt like the work was wasted, so I figured out a way to put it in a book … facts about different monsters, their hit points, where to find them, things like that.” She called her first-ever zine Things to Fight and Places to Fight Them.

Artists are often drawn to zines as an extension of their other forms of self-expression, or as a way to distribute their work.

“It’s very liberatory,” Landry said. “There are people who are making art all the time and don’t know what to do with it, or don’t have a way to get it out there. Finding zines and making zines is typically a way to do that.”

For others, they’re a tool. One person told Landry they fold a zine together on Sunday, then write in it like a diary for the week. “When they’re done, they don’t print it, they don’t make copies, they just put it on the shelf,” she said. “It’s just a way for them to get thoughts out of their heads … something that’s both outward and inward.”

There are more than 70 tablers showing their wares at this year’s event. Katherine Leung, based in Vermont, is doing Zine Fest for the first time. Leung’s Canto Cutie zine explores the experience of Cantonese people living in America. Like many other vendors, Leung’s table will offer other art products like prints and enamel pins.

“The unifying factor is that in some way, shape or form, they make zines,” Landry said. “One vendor’s zines are about learning how to knit, and there’s someone who makes coloring books … it’s a mix across the board, but in some shape or form these people are writing or publishing something themselves that they want other people to read and look at.”

Another new vendor is Silas Denver, who works using the name Sweater Muppets. “They are only now just getting into zine making, and all the stuff they’ve been putting out is cutting-edge and incredible stuff,” Landry said. “It feels really vital, and I’m so excited to have them.”

Landry said Zine Fest’s “four amazing sponsors” are Goosepoop, a Portland, Maine, game studio whose work includes the RPG Laundry Punks; Wrong Brain, a Seacoast collective celebrating “unconventional, under-represented & emerging arts”; the Boston Comics Foundation and Xomik Bük, a comic book collective.

Come with an open mind and eagerness to engage at the all-ages event, Landry urged. “What makes Luna … so popular with people is the culture there and the vibes. It’s one of these places where you can go and talk to interesting people who have like-minded interests, and they’re approachable.”

Luna Moth Zine Fest
When: Saturday, April 18, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Where: YWCA, 72 Concord St., Manchester
More: lunamothzinefest.bsky.social

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Landscapes and architecture among works at gallery opening

Glimpse Gallery in Concord will have creations for sale from six artists at its upcoming month-long show, done in a range of media from acrylic and oil to volcanic pumice and flakes of titanium. And it will serve as a museum of sorts for a local architect to show the process and product of his profession.

Many artistic moods are shown on the collected canvases. Andrew Freshour’s ink and watercolor works are fanciful and fun, from the playful gourmand at the center of “A Menagerie of Petite Treats” to the movement and flow of “Celestial Pilgrimage,” an array of storybook characters ascending to the clouds.

A few more are classical, one resembles a playing card, and the rotund caricatures in “Tea’d Off” and “La Reine du Gateau” are also delightful.

“You truly never know what you’re going to get when you come into Glimpse,” gallery owner Meme Exum said with a laugh. “These are clearly conversation starters, or stoppers … all perfectly framed and matted.”

Schenectady, New York-based artist Jeni Follman’s evocative landscape oil paintings are a focal point of the show, Exum continued.

“She’s one of those artists that just has such a style that is intrinsic to her,” Exum said. “She’ll have a large piece in the foyer, and in the second room in the gallery, hung salon style.”

The gallery’s curator Christina Landry-Boullion will display some of her monochromatic charcoal works, a departure from mixed media works shown at past Glimpse shows like “Lavender Peony,” “Blueberries” and “Mac Apple.” “Not what you see on her portfolio,” Exum said, “but these three large charcoal white, varying grays and black pieces.”

Painter Abigail Wade grew up in rural New Hampshire, but her impressionistic landscapes move beyond country life. “Morning on the Mississippi” captures a spare copse of trees surrounded by a curve in the river, “Lying Awake” has a brilliant urban skyline, while a “No Entry” sign at the center of “Green Fields” offers an ironic counterpoint to an idyllic snapshot.

Lizzy Berube fully embraces nature and the outdoors in her oil and acrylic paintings. “A Piece of Sky” has the perspective of someone lying in tall grass, staring up at clouds over water that look like a majestic mountain. “Time to” Go evokes a hiker’s staircase, while “Deja Blues” is a lovely meditation on rocky coastal waters.

The shows happen six times a year and run for a month, while alternating months are spent preparing for the next. One of the most compelling artists in the April show is Adam Sloat, who grew up in a house filled with art and music transfixed by Monet, Jackson Pollock and comic books.

Sloat hints at Joseph Cornell’s assemblage and Van Gogh’s texture, as he employs a variety of exotic media in his pieces, with frame materials also vital along with the painted surface. “Space Babies: Iteration One” is a vibrant example that aligns with Sloat’s artist statement goal for his art to be “a gateway for the viewer to create their own stories for what they see.”

Finally there’s architect William Exum, Meme’s husband, who will show the process behind a house built on the shore of Lake Toxaway, North Carolina, last year. “It’s engaging with design,” Meme said, adding the display has four sketches of the design surrounding a high resolution of the finished product.

“It shows people how architects plan out every detail when they get a well-designed house, not when they get a cookie-cutter big mansion,” she said. “From an artistic standpoint, I love the collaboration of details throughout the design.”

April 9 – May 9 show opening
When: Saturday, April 11, 5-7 p.m.
Where: Glimpse Gallery, 4 Park St. (Patriot Building), Concord
RSVP: contact@theglimpsegallery.com

Featured photo: First Light Niskayuna, NY by Jeni Folmann.