Cropped Will Cardini artwork

June 7th, 2024

Read the Room Opening

Filed under: Art Shows,Recaps — William Cardini @ 7:35 am

Thanks to everyone who came to the opening for Read the Room two weeks ago, we had a blast!!

Will Cardini at the Read the Room opening, laughing in front of his colorful vinyl mural
Me laughing in front of my mural, Blursed Miizzzard. Photo by Kate Schroeder.

It was great to see so many of the artists at the opening. We took a group shot at the end but didn’t capture everyone who showed up:

Group of artists making silly poses in front of the entry wall of the exhibition Read the Room
Left to right: Josh Rios, Travis Millard, Thayer N G Bray, Tim Brown, me (Will Cardini), Siobhán Gallagher, John F. Malta, Momoko Usami, and Joshua W. Cotter. Photo by Kimi Kitada.

Big ups to all the artists for trusting us with their brilliant artworks; my co-curators for bearing with my hyper-focus on details; everyone at Charlotte Street, especially Kimi and Kevin who helped so much with install; and my fam for putting up with all the time I had to put into this project.

The show is up thru Saturday, July 13th, and we have a couple more events planned, both taking place in the Charlotte Street Kemper Library:

  • Freestyle featuring jazz guitarist Adam Schlozman and zine-making with Read the Room artist Barbara Lane Tharsas, Saturday, June 8, 1 to 3pm
  • Inviting the Images, an autobio-comics-making workshop run by co-curator Jason Lips, Wednesday, June 26, 6 to 8pm

You can also just come by Charlotte Street Gallery, 3333 Wyoming Street Kansas City, MO 64111, Tuesday thru Friday 12 to 5pm and Saturday 11am to 5pm, to check the work out! Or see the install shots on my Instagram.

May 14th, 2024

Read the Room at Charlotte Street Foundation

Filed under: Art Shows — Tags: , , , , — William Cardini @ 11:02 pm

I’m excited to tell y’all about Read the Room, an art show I co-curated with Tim Brown, Thayer N G Bray, and Jason Lips that opens in a week and a half at Charlotte Street here in Kansas City! To explain what it’s about, here’s our curatorial statement:

Read the Room consists of more than 20 local and regional artists who work within or in dialogue with the worlds of alternative comics, zines, and cartooning.

The exhibition asks you to consider comics as an expansive and evolving mode of visual storytelling. Through the accessible language of comics, each artist authors their own understanding of the world as well as imagining new ones.

Read the Room invites you to spend time with these narrative works, appreciating them both as works of visual and literary art. Please, do read the room.

Artists include Kelsey Borch, Joshua W. Cotter, Momoko Usami, Nick Potter, Jenny Jo Hrabe, Jamie Bates, John F. Malta, Siobhán Gallagher, and Barbara Lane Tharsas. I’m grateful to my co-curators for opening my eyes to seeing comics in other media such as ceramics.

Three artworks presented in panels. Clockwise from left, a colorful painting of a woman, a comic set in a forest, and a ceramic skull.
A preliminary postcard mockup. Clockwise from left, artworks are Untitled by Jenny Jo Hrabe, a crop of a page from 1000 Doors by Kelsey Borch, and Traversing Twilight by Momoko Usami & Joshua W. Cotter.

The co-curators will also have works in the exhibition. I’ve created a big vinyl mural for it, here’s a sketch of what it’ll look like:

Colorful space wizard whose hands are giving a blessing even though his head has been chopped in half.

The opening will be 6 to 9pm on Friday, May 24th at Charlotte Street Gallery, 3333 Wyoming St, Kansas City, MO. I hope to see y’all there, but if you can’t make it to the opening, the show will remain up thru July 13th. Check out the post about Read the Room on the Charlotte Street Foundation website for more details about the show and related events.

April 3rd, 2019

Broken Panels at Lifted Spirits

Filed under: Art Shows,Events — Tags: , — William Cardini @ 11:12 am

This Friday I’ll be tabling at the Broken Panels Comic Book Creator Showcase at Lifted Spirits Distillery as part of the First Friday art event in the Crossroads district of Kansas City. The info’s on this flyer by the curator and local KC cartoonist, Shane Audley:

Lifted Spirits Presents Broken Panels Poster

You can also see all the event info on Facebook.

March 15th, 2013

Sammiches Exhibition Photos and Ordering Link

Filed under: Art Shows — Tags: , — William Cardini @ 11:51 am

Sorry I didn’t have a blog post for y’all this past Tuesday, I was sick.

Star Gods Press has posted some photos from the Sammiches Launch + Exhibition this past Friday in Vancouver. Here are some highlights:

Sammiches Book with a dude for comparison
A Sammiches book with a dude for comparison.

A Sammich on TV
A sammich on TV.

A strip of original sammich art
A strip of Sammiches original art.

Since I drew my sammich on my computer, I sent them a digital print. It’s the one with a light blue background in this photo:

You can see more photos from the opening on the Star Gods Press Flickr stream.

You can order Sammiches on the Star Gods Press site.

December 18th, 2012

Surreal Landscapes Opens this Thursday at Gallery Black Lagoon

Filed under: Art Shows — Tags: , , , — William Cardini @ 7:55 am

I’ve got some paintings and drawings in Surreal Landscapes, a show curated by my friend Cari Palazzolo. There’s a bunch of other awesome Austin artists in it also. There’s a reception this upcoming Thursday. Here’s the flyer:

Surreal Landscapes flyer
Flyer by Cari.

The flyer samples this watercolor I finished recently, “Landscape with Reptoid Skull”:

Landscape with Reptoid Skull by William Cardini
9 x 12″ watercolor.

I’ve also been working on a large acrylic painting:

Landscape with Reptoid Skull by William Cardini
30 x 48″ sketch and first color for “Petrified Forest Spirits Dancing Beneath the Crescent Nightmare World”.

You can see more process and preview shots in posts tagged “Surreal Landscapes” on my Tumblr.

September 22nd, 2009

Dispersal/Return Animation Remnants

Filed under: Art Shows — Tags: , , , — William Cardini @ 7:26 am

The opening reception for Dispersal/Return will be this Friday (9/25) at the University of New Mexico Art Museum in Albuquerque from 5 to 7 pm. If any of y’all will be in the area, be sure to check it out – it’ll feature a special performance of “America’s Big” by my two good friends the Dirty Monke (AKA Jonathan Loth) and Li’l Bunny Krunk (AKA Gabriel Romero). You can also view my installation, Cryptostructure, alongside many other thought provoking works by Land Arts of the American West alumni.

Smudge Studio recently reblogged my post about my installation, and you can scroll down and view the work of the other artists in the show here.

I spent a lot of time working on different animations for that installation, and I’ve collected together some of the remnants into a new video animated GIF, check it out:


7/12/22 update: I replaced the old video, embedded from Flickr, with an animated GIF hosted on my site. Same content as before, but now it seemlessly loops!

The floating, segmented being with yellow eyes that you see in the beginning contains the longest bits of hand-drawn animation that I’ve done to date. This is definitely something that I plan to do more of, as I find the time in between comics and drawing projects.

August 17th, 2009

Road Trippin’: ‘Bu’rque

Filed under: Art Shows — Tags: , , , , — William Cardini @ 7:38 am

As I’ve mentioned, I was in Albuquerque this past week was to install a sculpture for Dispersal/Return, a curated show of Land Arts of the American West alumni at the University of New Mexico Art Museum. Albuquerque is a pretty weird place: as my friend Ryan Henel put it, the city is the Baltimore of the southwest. I gotta say, I dig both places. Fortunately the University Art Museum is across historic Route 66 from the Frontier, a five-roomed New Mexican cuisine emporium. I feasted on fat breakfast burritos stuffed with green chilis. Glade and I brought a jar of chilis and a bag of Albuquerque tortillas back and had breakfest burritos yesterday morning, mmm hmm. Anyway, here’s a shot of the installation of the Cryptostructure in progress:

The sculpture is a pedestal with two TVs and PVC pipe on top that’s all wrapped in a blue tarp. Here’s the animation that’s playing on the TVs:

I bought a red light to shine on the Cryptostructure so that it’ll look more like my installation at MASS (see my previous post on this subject) but I won’t know if the curators decide to use it unless I go to the reception, which will be on September 24th. I don’t know for sure if I’ll be able to make it, but my fellow Landartians Li’l Bunny Krunk and the Dirty Monke will be performing there and then hosting their variety show Sunday School at the Petting Zoo in Albuquerque that Sunday. If I go, I’ll be sure to document and then share with y’all.

August 11th, 2009

Dispersal/Return

Filed under: Art Shows — Tags: , , , , , — William Cardini @ 7:24 am

This week I’m in Albuquerque installing a Cryptostructure in the University of New Mexico Art Museum for Dispersal/Return, an exhibition that’s part of the LAND/ART symposium.


A Cryptostructure, from my installation Cryptostructures of the Urscape at MASS gallery back in 12/2008.

A little history: back in the Fall of 2004, I participated in Land Arts of the American West, a study-abroad program that (at that time) was between the University of New Mexico and the University of Texas. It was a six-week journey through the Southwest where we investigated the various ways that humans use and respond to the extremes of the landscape and made art that engaged with what we learned. The program continues to create opportunities like this for its alumni. I’ll have some photos to share with y’all when I get back.

December 7th, 2008

MASS Gallery Hours

Filed under: Art Shows — Tags: , — William Cardini @ 12:01 pm

Thanks to everyone who came out for the opening! It was as cold as Hoth out there but I think we all had a gud thyme. I’m going to have gallery hours from 7-9 pm on Wednesday 12/10 and 12/17, and from 12-5 pm on Saturday 12/13 and 12/20, if any of y’all wanna stop by. Here’s some images from the opening:

Cryptostructures of the Urscape 001

Cryptostructures of the Urscape 002

Cryptostructures of the Urscape 003

November 14th, 2008

Cryptostructures of the Urscape

Filed under: Art Shows — Tags: , — William Cardini @ 8:50 pm

Cryptostructures of the Urscape

Opens Friday

December Fifth

from Eight to Eleven

in the Evening

at MASS Gallery, Austin, TX