NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ.- On September 1, the exhibition Self-Confessed! The Inappropriately Intimate Comics of Alison Bechdel, which encompasses the decades-long career of the illustrious cartoonist and graphic memoirist, opens at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers. It explores Bechdel’s work as a writer, an artist, and an archivist of the self, someone who constantly mines and shares her own experiences as a way to communicate something vitally human: the quest for love, acceptance, community, and social justice.

“The bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel) holds a long and proud place in world literature from Goethe to Philip Roth. Alison Bechdel joins this coterie with her wry and poignant graphic novels,” said Thomas Sokolowski, the Zimmerli’s director. “Conjoining her talents as a writer and an illustrator, she adroitly provides a guidebook for young people striving to find out just who they are. For this alone, she deserves our eternal gratitude.”

With more than 150 objects, Self-Confessed! features Bechdel’s pioneering comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, as well as the graphic memoirs Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama. The exhibition presents these primary bodies of work in depth through original sketches and drawings, while incorporating other aspects of Bechdel’s creative output, from early drawings to activist ephemera to large-scale self-portraits. It also includes a model of the set for the 2015 Tony Award-winning musical Fun Home and clips from the New York performances. The exhibition was organized by the Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont, where it debuted in early 2018.

“We are delighted to work with our colleagues at the Fleming and Alison Bechdel to bring this exciting exhibition to Rutgers,” said Donna Gustafson, the Zimmerli’s Curator of American Art and Mellon Director for Academic Programs. “Bechdel’s books and comics have a broad following on campus and this exhibition provides an important opportunity for a campuswide conversation about the arts in a variety of forms, the memoir as a device for storytelling, and LGBTQ lives.”

Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For, about the lives of a group of lesbian friends, ran from 1983 to 2008 and was syndicated in more than 50 alternative papers around the country. In 2006, Bechdel published the graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which explores her relationship with her father, her coming out, and his possible suicide. Fun Home was a New York Times bestseller and the basis of the musical of the same name. Bechdel followed up in 2012 with Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, which follows her relationship with her mother, girlfriends, therapists, and her exploration of psychoanalytic theory. Both books are works of multilayered complexity, employing nonlinear storytelling and a rich trove of literary and historical references.

Alison Bechdel lives in Vermont. She serves as the James Marsh Professor-At-Large at the University of Vermont and was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (aka, “genius grant”) in 2014. Vermont’s alternative paper Seven Days, which ran Dykes to Watch Out For, also published new strips by Bechdel that have focused on current political events. In 2017, Bechdel was named the third Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont – a position unique to the state – and portrayed herself in an episode of The Simpsons.

On view at the Zimmerli from September 1 to December 30, 2018, Self-Confessed! The Inappropriately Intimate Comics of Alison Bechdel is organized by the Fleming Museum of Art, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. The presentation at the Zimmerli is organized by Donna Gustafson, Curator of American Art and Mellon Director for Academic Programs.