The work of cartoonist author Keith Knight is featured at the Euphrat Museum at DeAnza College in the show Graphic Storytelling as Activism, which runs February 11 - April 17, 2008.

Graphic Storytelling as Activism presents a variety of art forms, including cartoons, political posters, digital art, book art, and more to explore a range of imagery with an activist bent. It began with graphic storyteller Keith Knight, who sees comics and cartooning as a powerful tool for social change.

Keith Knight exhibits work from three series. One group of cartoons is from the book Beginner’s Guide to Community-Based Arts, which features ten graphic stories about artists, educators, and activists across the U.S. Knight’s drawings bring alive people and stories, e.g. Lily Yeh, founder of the Village of Arts and Humanities in Philadelphia, and James “Big Man” Maxton, master mosaicist and former operations director at the Village. Other images on display are drawn from his nationally syndicated comic strips, “The K Chronicles” and “(th)ink.” Knight is an award-winning cartoonist, rapper, and hip-hop musician.

Cheri at Village Savant has posted a blog notice about it.

The Euphrat Museum is located in the Silicon Valley/San Francisco Bay Area and committed to involving De Anza College with its community. The Museum engages in regular collaborative public art projects like its “Urban Arts and Hip-Hop Festival” last year and several after-school and weekend programs for local children. The Euphrat is also constructing a beautiful new building. Go Euphrat!

Keith Knight has also been prominent in the national news this week as one of eleven cartoonists of color in the “Great Comic Strip Sit-in” that has brought attention to racial quotas many U.S. newspapers hold that limit the number of comic strips that are minority-drawn.

The issue has grabbed significant media attention including the Washington Post, whose staff writer Teresa Wiltz explains,

11 cartoonists of color will be drawing essentially the same comic strip, using irony to literally illustrate that point. In each strip, the artists will portray a white reader grousing about a minority-drawn strip, complaining that it’s a “Boondocks” rip-off and blaming it on “tokenism.” “It’s the one-minority rule,” says Lalo Alcaraz (”La Cucaracha”). “We’ve got one black guy and we’ve got one Latino. There’s not room for anything else.”

Mama’s Boyz shows all the participating syndicated cartoonists’ strips from February 10th. Numerous blogs also picked up on the story, among them Mikhaela Reid’s Boiling Point, Costa Tsiokos’ Population Statistic, Global Wire, Comics Reporter, and Comic Book Resources.

A little background on the “two strip rule” is offered in a blog, The Feed, from a year ago by African American media pundit Eric Deggans:

Reading about this creative protest I also discovered the group Cartoonists with Attitude.

Go Keith and friends!