A collaboration between comic artists, a research team and college students aims to tell the complex stories of homelessness and housing insecurity via ethnographic cartooning
The Portland State University Collaborative Comics Project aims to change the narrative around homelessness through ethnographic cartooning based on the experiences of PSU students. The project will culminate into the 10 comics published as a booklet and sold by Street Roots vendors. Street Roots spoke with 8 of the artists to learn more about their process.
As a child, Erika Rier gained access to the art world through comics. A Portland-based artist, Rier now creates art in a style she calls “folk surrealism.” She is one of 10 artists contributing to “Changing the Narrative: Stories of Student Homelessness and Housing Instability,” a booklet of ethnographic comics published by Portland State University. The artists were tasked with illustrating stories of students who experienced homelessness and housing instability. Led by PSU faculty member Kacy McKinney, the project received great interest from artists and students in the community applying to take part in the research. “The goal of the project is to build greater understanding, empathy and awareness — to change how we talk, think and teach about homelessness and understand poverty,” McKinney said.
Rier was drawn to the project because she felt connected to its mission. Rier is a multidisciplinary artist, but she often uses comics and zines as a medium to tell the stories of women and those on a journey to find their way home. Rier hopes the comics project will encourage readers to have compassion for those experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity, and to understand a complicated issue requires a variety of solutions.
Kanani Cortez: How did you get involved with Portland State working on this ethnographic cartooning publication?
Erika Rier: I saw the open call, I can’t remember where. Probably on the (Regional Arts and Culture Council) site. But I know Kacy a little bit. I used to be the manager of the Independent Publishing Resource Center, and she was involved with the IPRC to some extent. So when I saw that she was running the program. I got really excited. I also really loved her drawings of birds, and I have had experiences in my youth with housing insecurity. So I also felt drawn to the topic because I felt like it was something that I myself had experienced. I really wanted to get a chance to work on a project with someone I respect and also on a topic that I feel very passionate about.
Cortez: Speaking to some of the other works that you do. What kind of themes have you explored in your work previously? I saw you do a variety of things, but in terms of zines and cartooning, what kind of topics do you usually explore?
Rier: I call the style of work I do folk surrealism. Generally, I’m exploring the lives of women, or people who identify as women, those who resonate with the stories of women but in a very active way. The idea that women are active forces in their own lives and universes, rather than just passive objects, as they’re often depicted in artwork. I’m really interested in the dream life and the subconscious and mythology that speak to the experience of being a woman in today’s world. So, generally, that’s the idea. Though, the themes overall that my zine and comic work tend to explore are often like these journeys where there’s struggle and usually people searching for home. I have multiple zines where this is like a common theme. I just finished like kind of an art book, a comic thing and it’s called “Walking Mountains” and it follows a group of women who have been expelled from one place and are trying to find another place. The beginnings and endings are always a little obscure with the hopes that people can see their own struggles reflective back at them rather than whatever my idea of home is reflected back at them.
Cortez: Did you feel like you were able to bring that same theme into the work you did for this publication?
Rier: Yeah, what was interesting was the story that I was assigned. Because we didn’t get to choose the stories, the research team paired us with a person. (My subject) was a person whose life in some ways kind of reflected my own. I’ve moved around a lot. I’m from Maine, I’ve lived in New England, in New York City, in Arizona, and Washington State and then here. This person also had moved around a lot. Again, like on this kind of journey and Portland might be where the story ends up but doesn’t necessarily feel like the end of what their journeys might look like. It was interesting to me that the work was definitely about a journey and that journey also kind of reflected my own experience.
Cortez: Were you able to meet your subject in person and what was that relationship like?
Rier: I didn’t get to meet them, they were open to it and I was open to it but it never really came up as a necessary part of making the story. So it hasn’t happened yet though. I have an open invitation for them to come visit my studio if they ever want to. They made a film about some of the things that happened to them that kind of led into the story and it was provided in my source material, but me and the research team talked a lot about whether or not I should watch the film. I think we are afraid that if I watched the film, the way they told their story might affect how I told the story too much, so we decided to just go off of the source material that they provided within the context of the project, rather than me watching the film and maybe getting influenced in a different way by the other parts of their story. I haven’t had any personal contact with them. I mean I’ve received feedback from them and that’s about it. We didn’t do like a likeness. They kind of gave me guidance in the research notes about how to portray them, but it wasn’t like a ‘please draw me exactly the way that I look in this photograph’ which is nice because it’s not really the way I draw anyway.
Cortez: Speaking of other work and how you usually draw, I see that you also create in other mediums. What draws you specifically to comics and cartooning?
Rier: I think that comics and cartooning were my entry point into art. I had a lot of entry points into art, my stepfather was an artist. He had a studio in my house and I always watched him work and there were books around, and I was fascinated by that style ... classical art, but it never felt accessible to me, like something that I personally could do, but I got really into comics as a child. Comic book art felt way more accessible and I kind of started drawing more influenced by comics. I do draw some comics, but they’re very loosey-goosey — like I never know if I should call it a zine or a comic or an artist book — they’re always in the middle ground. I don’t do a lot of classic comics so I’ve kind of taken my love of comics, but then tried to squeeze it into fine art, which has put me in an awkward in-between area in the art world. I don’t know, it’s just been a place I’ve always loved in art, is comics. But I get bored drawing cells so I can’t draw regular comics where you draw the same thing over and over again. It drives me bonkers.
Cortez: In the comic you created ‘Strings Attached,’ you use a lot of really beautiful greens and blues. What determined your color palette? And what medium was this work done in?
Rier: It was done with gouache, which is kind of like fancy tempera paint that we all used in elementary school. It’s like what they used to make like illuminated manuscripts in the Middle Ages and what Hindu devotional art is done with and a lot of like Persian miniature paintings. It’s a medium that has a lot of history and I have always my whole life been fascinated with those three specific forms kind of because they remind me of like it almost feels like modern comic book art springs directly from things like illuminated manuscripts, you know, when you look at an old illuminated manuscript is not too far off from really what a comic book is in a lot of ways. I started using gouache, I think in my teens, I finally found a good source of it and started using it. I’m in my 40s now, so it’s been like 30 years of playing with this medium. The colors I thought a lot about. There weren’t a lot of specific color requests in the source materials, but there was a mention of a red. The color I used was not a true red, it’s called coral red. So it’s kind of in-between an orange and a red. And then the person also is very drawn to nature and plants and trees. So I tried to pick a lot of good greens and colors that could translate into plant life. I only used six colors for the whole zine and then I used black for line work. I tried to pick colors that could work as well for the happier moments in the story as well as the darker moments in the story. I was trying to pick colors that I could use through all the panels, that was kind of the trick.
Cortez: That makes a lot of sense and it translated really beautifully. In the comic, one of the characters, Titanic, is kind of an imaginary friend. How did you decide what Titanic would look like, considering that he’s like a made-up little guy?
Rier: Yeah, Titanic was tricky and I did the sketch for the initial concepts, but also asked a lot of questions about Titanic to get feedback, specifically about that character. So, the way Titanic is gone at the very beginning is how I did it in the sketch and that really resonated with the person whose story it is. Then they kind of mentioned this idea that Titanic kind of evolved and the idea of Titanic, or what took the place of Titanic as they’ve gotten older has changed. Titanic kind of starts morphing through the story into more of like a hummingbird shape, because that was an animal that resonated with them also. At the end, they have a little dog with them and the idea is that is actually a dog this person has recently gotten and has come into their life and the dog now has taken the place of what Titanic was for them in some ways. It was interesting to hear. I was totally fascinated by Titanic right from the beginning, so it was cool to get to create an image of Titanic and then see that it resonated. And then got this other idea that Titanic has evolved as an ongoing idea through their life, which is fun to try to draw.
Cortez: In the story it says it was not necessarily that Titanic was created to be a friend. Imaginary friends are so personal, especially to young people and children as they grow up. So that’s a beautiful evolution to see.
Rier: Yeah, and that was that idea, that phrase of Titanic, ‘not being so much of a friend but like more of a sounding board’ for this person, was part of the feedback that I got back after doing the sketch when I was kind of trying to get more information about Titanic. And I like latched onto that idea because I didn’t have an imaginary friend, but I had a very overly developed imaginary play realm in my head as a child. So this idea that imaginary play often helps children work through difficult situations, that really resonated with me. I definitely used imaginary play. I could just be sitting still, but have a whole other thing working through in my head and that just really resonated with me a lot as an artist.
Cortez: Speaking to what resonated with you, and you mentioned a little bit earlier that you share similar lived experiences with the subject of this comic. But as an artist, did you feel a connection to the subject of the comic? If not, how do you approach a subject who you might not have these shared experiences but still want to honor their lives through art?
Rier: It’s interesting because this is the second type of project I’ve done like this. I did one a couple of years ago with another comic book anthology that revolved around the issue of sexual assault and I felt very similarly doing both of these and that there was overlap with my lived experience, but then other places where it diverged, very significantly. It’s interesting because spending time with the subject matter and making art about it makes you have to work through a lot of stuff emotionally yourself. Like, ‘why am I having this reaction to this part of the story? Why do I feel this thing? Why am I thinking this thing?’ And I think both projects really expanded my idea of what housing insecurity really means. My experience is a little bit more that I really didn’t have any place to live, but even those moments in life where I wasn’t sure if I would have a place to live, were just as terrifying in a lot of ways. So the ways that houselessness and housing security, affect us and the ways that we compromise ourselves possibly in the process of trying to stay safe. And what is safety? There are so many different ideas that came up, just having to work through and seeing through this one story. Just reading the story is one thing, but then having to spend all this time and thought with each panel like it really made me explore a lot of different parts of this topic within my own psyche.
Cortez: The overall mission of the publication and research project is about recontextualizing what homelessness and specifically student homelessness, looks like. What kind of impact do you see this having on readers? What would you hope people are taking away from it?
Rier: I just really hope that people look at these stories and the people they are about and also a lot of the artists have had our own experiences, that I’m sure subconsciously have worked their way into work. I think it’s really easy to get in our heads as a community about what houselessness looks like and what kinds of people are affected by it. Way more people are affected by this, in the stereotypes in our head, the experiences that bring people to that point are diverse and intense. We need to have compassion and empathy to understand the problem. It just can’t be this, ‘these people need to do that.’ There is no universal within this problem. I feel like until we can understand that, there’s not a universal problem that brings people to this point. There’s not a universal solution. It’s a complicated issue that people are just shutting themselves off to in so many ways. I just hope it’s an entry point for people into thinking more deeply about this issue and realizing that people all around them have gone through points in their lives and they’ve experienced this.
Editor’s note: Street Roots has partnered with Kacy McKinney and her team at PSU to publish the PSU Collaborative Comics project. Street Roots’ vendors will sell the publication alongside the newspaper beginning Feb. 2.
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