The Thacher Gallery at the University of San Francisco Presents ‘Long Distance Relationship: Asian American Comics Artists and the Complexities of Connecting’

SAN FRANCISCO (August 20, 2024) – The Thacher Gallery at the University of San Francisco (USF) presents five comics artists with links to the Bay Area in ‘Long Distance Relationship: Asian American Comics Artists and the Complexities of Connecting’, from August 22 through November 10, 2024. Artists include Eddie Ahn, Rina Ayuyang, Tessa Hulls, MariNaomi, and Thien Pham. 

‘Long Distance Relationship’ presents five graphic novel and memoir creators, all celebrating recent book launches, who explore deeply personal and complicated relationships. Using text and image, these creators bring together the past and present to understand their bonds to family, friends, and community. As part of the Asian American diaspora, they share experiences linked to immigration and cultural and generational disconnection. At the same time, their stories are shaped by their unique voices and interests that include the environment, entertainment, travel, history, food, and friendship. Together, the works in ‘Long Distance Relationship’ demonstrate the power of sequential art to depict emotional depth and the universal longing for
Connection.

Eddie Ahn is the writer and artist of a graphic memoir, Advocate, (Penguin Random House, 2024) that chronicles his professional trajectory from college to the San Francisco environmental justice organization, Brightline. Award-winning cartoonist Rina Ayuyang’s new book, The Man in The McIntosh Suit, (Drawn & Quarterly Press, 2023), is a Filipino-American take on Depression-era noir featuring mistaken identities, speakeasies, and lost love in San Francisco’s Manilatown. Tessa Hulls is an artist, writer, and an adventurer and the author of Feeding Ghost (MCD, Farrer, Strause and Giroux, 2024), a graphic memoir that explores three generations of women from China to the U.S. MariNaomi is the award-winning author and illustrator of numerous graphic memoirs, including Turning Japanese (2dcloud, 2016; Extended edition Oni Press, 2023) and I Thought You Loved Me (Fieldmouse Press, 2023). Their work has appeared in over 100 publications. Thien Pham is a graphic novelist and educator. He is the author and/or illustrator of several middle-grade graphic novels, including Family Style (First Second, 2023), a graphic memoir about his family’s immigration to America told through the lens of food.

About the Thacher Gallery at the University of San Francisco

The Thacher Gallery is a public art gallery in the University of San Francisco’s Gleeson Library where creativity, scholarship, and community converge. The gallery is free and open to the public 12:00 to 6:00 p.m. daily. Appointments are required for the sculpture terrace. Holiday closures: 12/16, 12/17, 12/22-1/1.

About the University of San Francisco

The University of San Francisco is a private, Jesuit Catholic university that reflects the diversity, optimism, and opportunities of the city that surrounds it. USF offers more than 230 undergraduate, graduate, professional, and certificate programs in the arts and sciences, business, law, education, and nursing and health professions. At USF, each course is an intimate learning community in which top professors encourage students to turn learning into positive action, so the students graduate equipped to do well in the world — and inspired to change it for the better. For more information, visit usfca.edu.